Burst Erasure Correction of 2D convolutional codes

Abstract

In this paper we address the problem of decoding 2D convolutional codes over the erasure channel. In particular, we present a procedure to recover bursts of erasures that are distributed in a diagonal line. To this end we introduce the notion of balls around a burst of erasures which can be considered an analogue of the notion of sliding window in the context of 1D convolutional codes. The main result reduces the decoding problem of 2D convolutional codes to a problem of decoding a set of associated 1D convolutional codes.