``Note: Correction to the 1997 Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding''

Technical Report UT-CS-03-504, University of Tennessee, April, 2003.

This has been published in: Software, Practice & Experience, Volume 35, Issue 2, February, 2005, pp. 189-194. Please cite that paper instead of this technical report.

Available via anonymous ftp to cs.utk.edu in pub/plank/papers/CS-03-504.ps (and in PDF at CS-03-504.pdf).

Procedures for Reed-Solomon Coding

Please see http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~jplank/plank/gflib/ for an implementation of Galois-Field arithmetic in GF(2^8) and GF(2^16), and for Reed-Solomon coding as described in this paper.

Abstract

In 1997, SPE published a tutorial by Plank on implementing Reed-Solomon codes for erasure correction in redundant data storage systems. The motivation of this tutorial was to present these codes, which are typically described mathematically by coding theorists, in a way accessible to the programmers who need to implement them. The tutorial as published presented an information dispersal matrix A, which does not have the properties claimed -- that the deletion of any m rows results in an invertable n*n matrix. The purpose of this note is to present a correct information dispersal matrix that has the desired properties, and to put the work in current context.

Postscript of the paper
PDF of the paper

Citation Information

Plain Text:

   .techreport     pd:03:rs
   author          J. S. Plank and Y. Ding
   title           Note: Correction to the 1997 Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding
   institution     University of Tennessee
   month           April
   year            2003
   number          CS-03-504
   where           http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~jplank/plank/papers/CS-03-504.html

Bibtex:

@TECHREPORT{pd:03:rs,
        author = "J. S. Plank and Y. Ding",
        title = "Note: Correction to the 1997 Tutorial on Reed-Solomon Coding",
        institution = "University of Tennessee",
        month = "April",
        year = "2003",
        number = "CS-03-504",
        where = "http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~jplank/plank/papers/CS-03-504.html"
}