Linear programming decoding of binary linear codes for symbol-pair read channels

In this paper, we develop a new decoding algorithm of binary linear codes for symbol-pair read channel. The Symbol-pair read channel has recently been introduced by Cassuto and Blaum to model channel whose write resolution is higher than read resolution. The proposed decoding algorithm is based on the linear programming (LP). It is proved that the proposed LP decoder has the maximum-likelihood (ML) certificate property, i.e., the output of the decoder is guaranteed to be the ML codeword when it is integral. We also introduce the fractional pair distance d
_fp
of the code which is a lower bound on the minimum pair distance. It is proved that the proposed LP decoder corrects up to ⌈d
_fp
/2⌉ - 1 errors.