Carolyn Mayer – University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Coding Techniques for Partial Erasure Channels.

Partial erasure channels were recently introduced to model erasure events in applications such as flash memories. In these channels, some information may remain after an erasure event.  After reviewing these channels, we present results in two directions. First, we show how multilevel coding and multistage decoding may be applied on different partial erasure channels and classify cases in which the subchannels are simple erasure channels. Second, we consider Luby Transform (LT) codes, a class of fountain codes, over partial erasure channels. We present a modified decoding process for these codes and compare their efficiency with standard LT codes on the -ary erasure channel.