Topic summary
Error correction codes
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Error correction code.
Describing the performance of an ECC
Most forward error correction codes correct only bit-flips, but not bit-insertions or bit-deletions. In this setting, the Hamming distance is the appropriate way to measure the bit error rate. A few forward error correction codes are designed to correct bit-insertions and bit-deletions, such as Marker Codes and Watermark Codes. The Levenshtein distance is a more appropriate way to measure the bit error rate when using such codes.