Streaming Codes for Channels with Burst and Isolated Erasures

Abstract: We study low-delay error correction codes for streaming recovery over a class of packet-erasure channels that introduce both burst-erasures and isolated erasures. We propose a simple, yet effective class of codes whose parameters can be tuned to obtain a tradeoff between the capability to correct burst and isolated erasures. Our construction generalizes previously proposed low-delay codes which are effective only against burst erasures. We establish an information theoretic upper bound on the capability of any code to simultaneously correct burst and isolated erasures and show that our proposed constructions meet the upper bound in some special cases. We discuss the operational significance of column-distance and column-span metrics and establish that the rate 1/2 codes discovered by Martinian and Sundberg [IT Trans.\, 2004] through a computer search indeed attain the optimal column-distance and column-span tradeoff. Numerical simulations over a Gilbert-Elliott channel model and a Fritchman model show significant performance gains over previously proposed low-delay codes and random linear codes for certain range of channel parameters.