Application of erasure-only decoded Reed-Solomon codes in cell recovery for congested ATM networks

Congestion at any switching node, in ATM networks, may result in cell discards. This may bring about unsatisfactory transmission quality, particularly in the case of time sensitive data such as voice and video. The standard compression code for digital video over ATM networks, MPEG-2, is very sensitive to errors and cell losses, for cell loss impacts the entire frame of data. Lost cells may be considered as burst of errors with known locations, i.e., erasure bursts. Reed-Solomon (RS) codes are, perhaps, the most efficient burst error correcting codes in practical use today. Interleaved RS codes with erasure-only decoding strategy present an effective and inexpensive method for cell recovery in congested ATM networks.