Burstivirheet

Burstivirheet, or burst errors, refer to sequences of corrupted bits or symbols that occur contiguously in a data stream, rather than isolated single-bit faults. They arise from impulse noise, synchronization glitches, fading, electrical interference, or hardware faults, causing several consecutive bits to be erroneous.

In practice, bursts vary in length and may be modeled statistically; a common approach treats a channel as a two-state process (good and bad) where errors cluster when in the bad state, as in the Gilbert-Elliott model.

Burst errors challenge simple parity checks and random-error-correcting codes; to mitigate bursts, systems use interleaving to spread consecutive errors over time, and employ burst-error-correcting codes such as Reed-Solomon, BCH, or convolutional codes with interleaving.

Applications include digital communications (wireless, fiber, satellite), storage devices (hard drives, flash memory), and data transmission standards that must tolerate impulse noise and fading.

See also topics such as burst-error correction, interleaving, and channel models like Gilbert-Elliott.