Determining the burst-correcting limit of cyclic codes

Two new computationally efficient algorithms are developed for finding the exact burst-correcting limit of a cyclic code. The first algorithm is based on testing the colmn rank of certain submatrices of the parity-check matrix of the code. An auxiliary result is a proof that every cyclic codes with a minimum distance of at least three, corrects at least all bursts of length or less. The second algorithm, which requires somewhat less computation, is based on finding the length of the shortest linear feedback shift-register that generates the subsequences of length of the sequence formed by the coefficients of the parity-check polynomial , augmented with leading zeros and trailing zeros. Tables of the burst-correcting limit for a large number of binary cyclic codes are included.