Codes Correcting Burst and Arbitrary Erasures for Reliable and Low-Latency Communication

Motivated by modern network communication applications which require low latency, we study codes that correct erasures with low decoding delay. We provide a simple explicit construction that yields convolutional codes that can correct both burst and arbitrary erasures under a maximum decoding delay constraint $T$. Our proposed code has efficient encoding/decoding algorithms and requires a field size that is linear in $T$. We study the performance of our code over the Gilbert-Elliot channel; our simulation results show significant performance gains over low-delay codes existing in the literature.