Coding Theory Seminar
Speaker: Birenjith Sasidharan (IIT Palakkad)
Host: Sudhir R. Ghorpade
Title: Block circulant codes with application to blockchain networks
Time, day and date: 11:00:00 AM - 12:00:00 PM, Monday, July 7
Venue: Ramanujan Hall
Abstract: In this talk, we present a family of [n,k,d] block circulant codes composed of many [n0 << n, k0 << k, d0 < d] local codes and that satisfy two properties: (1) the global code supports distributed decoding of up to (d-1) erasures without a central coordinator, and (2) the local codes support cryptographic verification of code symbols using a commitment scheme. These properties make the code ideal for use in a blockchain protocol that ensures data availability by random sampling - an emerging application of block codes. Compared to the currently used 2D Reed-Solomon (RS) code, the block circulant code achieves a larger fractional distance (d/n), as desired in the protocol, for the same rate (k/n) in the high-rate regime. We will discuss the code's topology, its instantiation using RS codes as local codes, and provide a proof of its minimum distance.