A family of efficient burst-correcting array codes

Summary form only given, as follows. A family of binary burst-correcting array codes is presented and defined as follows: Consider an n1 × n2 array with n1 = 4u + v + 2 and n2 = 6u + 2v + 5, u ≥ 1, V ≥ 0, v ≠ 1, each row and column having even parity. The bits are read diagonally starting from the upper left corner. The columns are viewed cyclically, i.e., the array is a cylinder. If one diagonal has been read out, one proceeds with the second diagonal preceding it. It is proved that codes of this type can correct any burst of length up to n1. The burst-correcting efficiency of this family tends to 4/5 as u → ∞. As a comparison, the burst-correcting efficiency of other families of array codes tends to 2/3. The same is true for Fire codes. A simple decoding algorithm for the codes defined above is presented.