Coding in the Block-Erasure Channel

In this correspondence, we study an M-ary block-erasure channel with B blocks, where with probability epsi a block of L coded symbols is erased. The behavior of the error probability of coded systems over such channels is studied, and we show that, if the code is diversity-wise maximum-distance separable, its word error probability is equal to the outage probability, which admits a very simple expression. This correspondence is intended to complement the error probability analysis in previous work by Lapidoth and shed some light on the design of coding schemes for nonergodic channels.