This paper presents new FEC codes for the erasure channel, LDPC-Band, that
have been designed so as to optimize a hybrid iterative-Maximum Likelihood (ML)
decoding. Indeed, these codes feature simultaneously a sparse parity check
matrix, which allows an efficient use of iterative LDPC decoding, and a
generator matrix with a band structure, which allows fast ML decoding on the
erasure channel. The combination of these two decoding algorithms leads to
erasure codes achieving a very good trade-off between complexity and erasure
correction capability.Comment: 5 page