An Explicit Construction of Optimal Streaming Codes for Channels With Burst and Arbitrary Erasures

Abstract

This paper presents a new construction of error correcting codes which achieves optimal recovery of a streaming source over a packet erasure channel. The channel model considered is the sliding-window erasure model, with burst and arbitrary losses, introduced by Badr et al. We present a simple construction, when the rate of the code is at least 1/2, which achieves optimal error correction in this setup. Our proposed construction is explicit and systematic. It uses off-the-shelf maximum distance separable (MDS) codes and maximum rank distance (MRD) Gabidulin block codes as constituent codes and combines them in a simple manner. This is in contrast to other recent works, where the construction involves a careful design of the generator or parity check matrix from first principles. The field size requirement which depends on the constituent MDS and MRD codes is also analyzed.