The well-known approach of Bose, Ray-Chaudhuri and Hocquenghem and its
generalization by Hartmann and Tzeng are lower bounds on the minimum distance
of simple-root cyclic codes. We generalize these two bounds to the case of
repeated-root cyclic codes and present a syndrome-based burst error decoding
algorithm with guaranteed decoding radius based on an associated folded cyclic
code. Furthermore, we present a third technique for bounding the minimum
Hamming distance based on the embedding of a given repeated-root cyclic code
into a repeated-root cyclic product code. A second quadratic-time probabilistic
burst error decoding procedure based on the third bound is outlined. Index
Terms Bound on the minimum distance, burst error, efficient decoding, folded
code, repeated-root cyclic code, repeated-root cyclic product cod