Pending clean-up of papers

 I received the following comments with potential issues in some of my work.  I'm delighted to receive such feedback since a major point of my work is to try to get a complex topic straight.

At the moment I'm fully engaged working on self-driving car safety so it will be a while before I can resolve these. However, in the spirit of transparency here are the points raised so you know to be careful on these points when reading my work.

(This is posted with permission conditioned on anonymity. Thanks to the person who sent the comments.)

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1) On page 5 of http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/roses/dsn04/koopman04_crc_poly_embedded.pdf you say that SMBus uses CRC-8, polynomial 0xEA in your notation and say that 0x83 would be better. I am not familiar with SMBus but three sources say that the polynomial chosen for SMBus was 0x83.

CRC Catalogue entry CRC-8/SMBUS lists poly=0x07 (they use what Wikipedia calls Normal form)

SMBus Spec page 27 clearly states that the polynomial is x8 + x2 + x1 + 1

Presentation 22 April 1999 USAR Systems has the same.

2) On same page of same document as 1), it says XMODEM also uses CRC-8 polynomial 0xEA but it appears that XMODEM uses a 16-bit CRC according to Wikipedia and the CRC Catalogue amongst others. There is reference to an earlier 8-bit FCS but that was called a checksum in the references I found, not a CRC. ref1, ref2, ref3

3) Finally, I am having trouble reproducing your Probability of Undetected Error graphs from your koopman04 paper. The maxino_ms.pdf, page 9 gives the equation for Pud as

Pud = HW * BER^x * (1-BER)^(n-x)

where n is code word length in bits, x is number of bit errors, HW is Hamming weight at the HD. For example, polynomial 0x9C at 9 bit data word length is shown as just above 1e-33 (I used a tool to read scaled values off log charts to get about 6e-33 since I can't find a numeric value anywhere), but the formula gives 3.4e-29 at same BER of 1e-6, since HD=5 and HW(5)=34.

I suspect this is because your Pud graphs are, as you say in section 4.1, "weighted by the percentage of errors caught per corresponding polynomial weights for each data word length" but I cannot find a formula or example of this weighting which gives the required correction. Although formula (2) in page 18 of the faa15_tc-14-49.pdf document is different from the above, as far as I can see the combin(c, HD) term cancels out because UndetectedFractionHD = HW/combin(c, HD). So please could you provide the weighting formula, preferably with one numerical example.

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Initial responses:

- I would not be at all surprised for #1 and #2 I was referring to documents that got the polynomials wrong, which was previously quite common but is getting better over time.

- For #3 the graphs and probability equations can be a bit tricky.  I'll have to get all that stuff back in my head before being able to respond.  I'd suggest going with the analysis here if you're in doubt, which had the math reviewed by researchers from Honeywell, so hopefully it's OK: http://www.tc.faa.gov/its/worldpac/techrpt/tc14-49.pdf