Forward error correction in optical communication systems

• Main Author: Xie, Bing
• Other Authors: Li Zhihong
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Optics, optoelectronics, photonics
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/20872
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Forward error correction (FEC) technique has been widely used in wireless communication and mass storage applications. In recent years, FEC has also become very important to optical communication because of its powerful error correcting ability. FEC codes provide performance gain by trading off coding gain with coding redundancy and decoding complexity. For transmission bit rate of 10 Gb/s or higher, coding redundancy of less than 25% is desired. Therefore, FEC schemes with moderate coding redundancy and tolerable decoding complexity are desirable and very important for high-speed long-haul optical systems. In this thesis, two FEC augmentation schemes, namely wavelength interleaving and errors-and-erasures decoding (E&ED), are proposed to improve the FEC performance of optical channels subjected to polarization mode dispersion (PMD) and chromatic dispersion (CD). Wavelength interleaving provides frequency diversity, hence reducing the effective error burst length and improving FEC performance without requiring more coding redundancy. In E&ED scheme, an erasure zone is used to collect highly unreliable received symbols called erasure symbols.