The Partial-Inverse Approach to Linearized Polynomials and Gabidulin Codes With Applications to Network Coding

This paper introduces the partial-inverse problem for linearized polynomials and develops its application to decoding Gabidulin codes and lifted Gabidulin codes in linear random network coding. The proposed approach is a natural generalization of its counterpart for ordinary polynomials, thus providing a unified perspective on Reed–Solomon codes for the Hamming metric and for the rank metric. The basic algorithm for solving the partial-inverse problem is a common parent algorithm of a Berlekamp–Massey algorithm, a Euclidean algorithm, and yet another algorithm, all of which are obtained as easy variations of the basic algorithm. Decoding Gabidulin codes can be reduced to the partial-inverse problem via a key equation with a new converse. This paper also develops new algorithms for interpolating crisscross erasures and for joint decoding of errors, erasures, and deviations in random network coding.