Decoding of MDP Convolutional Codes Over the Erasure Channel

When transmitting over an erasure channel like the Internet, one of the problems encountered is the delay experienced on the received information which is due to the possible retransmission of lost packets. One way to eliminate these delays is by using forward error correction. Until now only block codes have been used for such a task, see,. In this paper the authors demonstrate how to Maximum Distance Profile (MDP) convolutional codes provide an attractive alternative.