In this paper, we propose a new way of providing cyclic structures to convolutional codes. We define the skew cyclic convolutional codes as left ideals of a quotient ring of a suitable non-commutative polynomial ring. In contrast to the previous approaches to cyclicity for convolutional codes, we use Ore polynomials with coefficients in a field (the rational function field over a finite field), so their arithmetic is very well known and we may proceed similarly to cyclic block codes. In particular, we show how to obtain easily skew cyclic convolutional codes of a given dimension, and we compute an idempotent generator of the code and its dual.

We propose a decoding algorithm for a class of convolutional codes called skew Reed-Solomon convolutional codes. These are convolutional codes of designed Hamming distance endowed with a cyclic structure yielding a left ideal of a non-commutative ring (a quotient of a skew polynomial ring). In this setting, right and left division algorithms exist, so our algorithm follows the guidelines of the Sugiyama's procedure for finding the error locator and error evaluator polynomials for Goppa block codes.

We design a non-commutative version of the Peterson–Gorenstein–Zierler decoding algorithm for a class of codes that we call skew RS codes. These codes are left ideals of a quotient of a skew polynomial ring, which endow them of a sort of non-commutative cyclic structure. Since we work over an arbitrary field, our techniques may be applied both to linear block codes and convolutional codes. In particular, our decoding algorithm applies for block codes beyond the classical cyclic case.