Resilience of Reed-Solomon Codes against Single-Frequency Electromagnetic Disturbances: Fault Mechanisms and Fault Elimination through Symbol Inversion

Abstract

Modern safety-critical systems depend heavily on communication networks while operating in increasingly polluted electromagnetic environments. Forward Error Correction codes are increasingly being used in safety-critical applications; however, vulnerabilities can still be caused by undetected corrupted data. Within this paper, the effectiveness of primitive Reed–Solomon Codes under single-frequency electromagnetic disturbances is assessed. Additionally, the impact of various parameters including the message length, the Reed–Solomon Codes’ symbol size, and the amplitude of the induced voltages are also investigated. Simulations show that, at harmonics and some certain ratios of the bit-rate frequency, the susceptibility of Reed–Solomon Codes relative to this type of disturbance increases substantially. In worse-case scenarios, the rate of undetected corrupted data at these ratios could increase to values above 80%. It is shown that the main reason that Reed–Solomon Codes fail to detect such errors is due to the repetitive nature of code words’ symbols, as well as a special relation among the symbol size, the channel’s bit-rate, and the disturbance frequency. Accordingly, this paper proposes to add an extra inversion layer to the communication protocol to enhance the resiliency of these codes against single-frequency electromagnetic disturbances. Finally, it is shown that the proposed layer substantially mitigates the ratio of undetected corrupted data under the considered electromagnetic environment. By using the proposed approach, the rate of undetected corrupted data at the frequencies of concern decreased to values near 0%.