On the structure of Hermitian codes and decoding for burst errors

In this paper, it is proved that Hermitian code is a direct sum of concatenated Reed-Solomon codes over GF(q/sup 2/). Based on this discovery, first, a new method for computing the dimension and tightly estimating the minimum distance of the Hermitian code is derived. Secondly, a new decoding algorithm, which is especially effective in dealing with burst errors with complexity O(n/sup 5/3/), is described. Finally, some possible approaches for optimization of Hermitian codes are discussed.