Resilience of Reed-Solomon Codes Against Single-Frequency Electromagnetic Disturbances: Fault Elimination Through Encoder Tuning

In increasingly electromagnetic-polluted environments, communication networks are becoming more vulnerable. Even networks equipped with error control techniques suffer from this problem. Electromagnetic disturbances can result in corrupted data which are undetectable by error control techniques. Such scenarios are extremely dangerous as the system is unaware of the corruption. This could lead to critical failures. Thus, protecting communication networks against this type of undetected corrupted data is of the utmost importance. In this regard, this paper presents an effective fault elimination approach through encoder tuning. This technique enhances the resiliency of a well-known forward error correction code, known as primitive Reed-Solomon Codes, against steady-state single-frequency electromagnetic disturbances. It is found that this approach outperforms the previously proposed multi-layer inversion-based fault elimination approach in mitigating undetected corrupted data. Furthermore, it is shown that encoder tuning has two main implementation advantages over our previous approach. First, it does not require an extra layer to perform fault elimination. Second, it eliminates the overhead of performing double syndrome calculation at the consumer side.