The burst error correcting capabilities of a simple array code

We propose a simple decoder for a widely used array code, known as the EVENODD code, which is originally designed to correct phased burst errors, to make it useful for correcting nonphased errors. The proposed scheme is capable of correcting almost all bursts up to a certain length. We show that the failure rate is sufficiently small and approaches zero as the block length increases. The redundancy of the code is twice the maximal burst length, which is a lower bound for the redundancy of a true burst-error-correcting code. Both the encoder and the decoder have very low complexity, both in terms of number of operations and in terms of computer code size.