Burst erasure correcting LDPC codes

In this paper low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are designed for burst erasure channels. Firstly, lower bounds for the maximum length erasure burst that can always be corrected with message-passing decoding are derived as a function of the parity-check matrix properties. We then show how parity-check matrices for burst erasure correcting LDPC codes can be constructed using superposition, where the burst erasure correcting performance of the resulting codes is derived as a property of the stopping set size of the base matrices and the choice of permutation matrices for the superposition. This result is then used to design both single burst erasure correcting LDPC codes which are also resilient to the presence of random erasures in the received bits and LDPC codes which can correct multiple erasure bursts in the same codeword.