Error control codes for digital recording systems

The author considers a concatenated coding scheme for digital recording systems. This concatenated scheme uses an inner code to detect errors during the storage/retrieval process and to erase the corresponding errors. The Reed-Solomon code is used as an outer code to correct the errors (undetected errors) and the erasures (detected errors) generated by the inner code. Several error detecting codes are considered as the inner code, and the corresponding block error probabilities and average net information that can be stored and retrieved without error in a unit time are computed to make performance comparisons