Exploiting the CRC-CCITT code on the binary erasure channel

Cyclic redundancy check (CRC) codes are designed for error detection, but can in principle be used for error correction. In this work, we analyze the performance of the CRC-CCITT code, both as a stand-alone code, and as the outer code in a serially concatenated code with an inner low-density parity-check code on the binary erasure channel. To optimize the recovery failure probability for low channel erasure probabilities, we propose to add a permutation/interleaver between the outer and inner codes in order to increase the overall stopping distance.