Trellis codes for periodic erasures

This paper describes techniques for the design and analysis of trellis codes that provide reliable communication over every channel in a specified set of possible channels, where each channel is characterized by additive white Gaussian noise with a distinct periodic variation in signal-to-noise ratio. An important practical application for such trellis codes is the periodic erasure channel produced by partial-band interference dispersed by a block interleaver. We present trellis codes that provide reliable communication over all periodic erasure patterns of a given period for which the number of unerased coded bits per period is at least equal to the number of information bits per period.