Codes Correcting a Burst of Deletions or Insertions

This paper studies codes that correct bursts of deletions. Namely, a code will be called a b-burst-correcting code if it can correct a deletion of any b consecutive bits. While the lower bound on the redundancy of such codes was shown by Levenshtein to be asymptotically log(n) + b - 1, the redundancy of the best code construction by Cheng et al. is b(log(n/b + 1)). In this paper we close on this gap and provide codes with redundancy at most log(n) + (b - 1) log(log(n)) + b - log(b). We also extend the burst deletion model to two more cases: 1. a deletion burst of at most b consecutive bits and 2. a deletion burst of size at most b (not necessarily consecutive). We extend our code construction for the first case and study the second case for b = 3, 4. The equivalent models for insertions are also studied and are shown to be equivalent to correcting the corresponding burst of deletions.