On the Joint Error-and-Erasure Decoding for Irreducible Polynomial Remainder Codes

Abstract: A general class of polynomial remainder codes is considered. Such codes are very flexible in rate and length and include Reed-Solomon codes as a special case. As an extension of previous work, two joint error-and-erasure decoding approaches are proposed. In particular, both the decoding approaches by means of a fixed transform are treated in a way compatible with the error-only decoding. In the end, a collection of gcd-based decoding algorithm is obtained, some of which appear to be new even when specialized to Reed-Solomon codes.