This paper reports on an experimental system of an integrated communication network built with components representing the state-of-the-art in the area of optical fiber transmission and large-scale integration of logic functions. These components make it possible to apply new concepts for signal processing, transmission, and switching in the experimental system. The large bandwidth of optical channels allows the transmission of all kinds of communication services including data, audio, and video, while semiconductor technology offers low cost realization and mass production of complex signal processing and switching functions to handle all these services within one network. The concept of the system is presented and results on system components and subsystems are given.

Two new computationally efficient algorithms are developed for finding the exact burst-correcting limit of a cyclic code. The first algorithm is based on testing the colmn rank of certain submatrices of the parity-check matrix of the code. An auxiliary result is a proof that every cyclic(n,k)codes with a minimum distance of at least three, corrects at least all bursts of length\lfloor (n - 2k + 1)/2 \rflooror less. The second algorithm, which requires somewhat less computation, is based on finding the length of the shortest linear feedback shift-register that generates the subsequences of lengthn - kof the sequence formed by the coefficients of the parity-check polynomialh(x), augmented with\lfloor (n-k)/2 \rfloor -1leading zeros and trailing zeros. Tables of the burst-correcting limit for a large number of binary cyclic codes are included.