Construction of efficient error-correcting codes for a compound-error channel

Advances in digital communications have led to the use of compound channels. This has resulted in compound errors, which are generally considered as a mixture of random and burst errors. In order to realize highly reliable communication in such a system a compound-error-correcting code is required. This paper seeks to demonstrate that a suitable combination of an extended BCH code and Fire code permits construction of a new compound-error-correcting code which is more efficient than a Hsu code, one of the most efficient algebraic compound-error-correcting codes known at present. The codes proposed in this paper are fundamentally based on BCH and Fire codes, leading to simple and systematic decoding.