Unequal error protection for LZSS compressed data using Reed-Solomon codes

An unequal error protection strategy for minimising the impact of error bursts in the storage or transmission of compressed data has been proposed. The strategy is designed for the LZSS algorithm, which is a dynamic dictionary compression method. Through extensive computer simulations we investigate which information classes within LZSS are more sensitive to burst errors. Based on these results, an unequal error protection strategy that greatly reduces the error propagation during the decompression process has been proposed. Numerical results using text files from a common database are presented.