Burst Distance and Multiple-Burst Correction

It is a property of many burst-noise channels that bursts occur not singly, but in bursts of bursts or in random multiple bursts. 1 For this reason, single burst-correcting (SBC) codes do not give good error-control performance on such channels. It is therefore desirable to have codes which correct multiple bursts within a given block. Some multipleburst correcting (MBC) codes have been known for some time. However, until recently the complexity of the decoding process has not been comparable to that of correcting single bursts. Naturally, we do not expect the decoding process to be as simple for MBC codes as for SBC codes. We would expect the ideal complexity of a double-BC code to be in the same ratio as a SBC code that a double-error-correcting complexity is to a single-error-correcting complexity. * This work was partially supported by the U. S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Contract AF 49 (638)-1600. This material was taken from a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering. SS9