  In this paper we present a concrete algebraic construction of a novel class
of convolutional codes. These codes are built upon generalized Vandermonde
matrices and therefore can be seen as a natural extension of Reed-Solomon block
codes to the context of convolutional codes. For this reason we call them
weighted Reed-Solomon (WRS) convolutional codes. We show that under some
constraints on the defining parameters these codes are Maximum Distance Profile
(MDP), which means that they have the maximal possible growth in their column
distance profile. We study the size of the field needed to obtain WRS
convolutional codes which are MDP and compare it with the existing general
constructions of MDP convolutional codes in the literature, showing that in
many cases WRS convolutional codes require significantly smaller fields.
