Correction of synchronization errors with burst-error-correcting cyclic codes

It is shown that every linear cyclic
b
-burst-error-correcting code over any finite field can be modified to correct up to
(b-2)
symbols of synchronization slippage without additional redundancy, while maintaining its additive error-correcting capability in the absence of synchronization errors. For codes that are interleaved to a degree
m
, the synchronization error-correcting capability is
m (b-1) - 1
symbols, where
b \geq 3
is the length of the burst each subcode corrects. This technique gives an optimum burst-error-correcting code a synchronization error-corecfing capability that is only one symbol short of the known upper bound and is hence asymptotically optimal. Moreover, the implementation is very simple.