Separating redundancy of linear MDS codes

Linear codes over channels causing erasures and errors can be decoded by deleting the erased symbols and decoding the resulting vector with respect to a punctured code. To facilitate decoding of MDS codes, parity-check matrices are proposed that contain, as submatrices, parity-check matrices of the punctured codes. Depending on the maximum number of erasures, the separating redundancy, which is the smallest number of rows in the proposed parity-check matrices, is determined.