INVESTIGATION OF THE ERROR-ERASURE CHANNEL.

Several approaches are outlined to the general problem of decoding a digital code word which contains both erasures nulls and errors crossovers. A complementary sequence method is discussed which, for the binary case, reduces the errors-plus-erasures case to that of erasures only, for which a systematic decoding procedure exists. A generalization of this method is also outlined which permits a trade-off between the error-correction and erasure-fill-in capabilities. Some techniques for utilizing the properties of certain special classes of codes in decoding a binary error-erasure channel BEEC are also presented. Author