On the Duality of Erasures and Defects

Abstract: In this paper, the duality of erasures and defects will be investigated by comparing the binary erasure channel (BEC) and the binary defect channel (BDC). The duality holds for channel capacities, capacity achieving schemes, minimum distances, and upper bounds on the probability of failure to retrieve the original message. Also, the binary defect and erasure channel (BDEC) will be introduced by combining the properties of the BEC and the BDC. It will be shown that the capacity of the BDEC can be achieved by the coding scheme that combines the encoding for the defects and the decoding for the erasures. This coding scheme for the BDEC has two separate redundancy parts for correcting erasures and masking defects. Thus, we will investigate the problem of redundancy allocation between these two parts.