N.V. Shishkin1, A.V. Yurlov2, I.N. Molchanov3, V.O. Yudin4

1–4 The Academy of the Federal Guard Service of the Russian Federation Russia (Orel, Russia)
1 shishkin_nv@mail.ru, 2 yurlov@bk.ru, 3 zorro_42@rambler.ru, 4 attitudehxc@gmail.com

Due to the rapid increase of network traffic in the last few years, many telecommunication operators have started transitions to 100G optical networks and beyond. However, high speed optical networks need more efficient Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes to deal with the optical impairments.

Forward error correction is widely used in optical communications to improve error correction and extend optical transmission distance. It is also used to reduce optical transmitter power and system costs. In response to the rapid growth of optical communications, the ITU-T has started researching FEC coding and has recommended ITU-T G.709 and G.975.1. As optical transmission systems evolve towards longer transmission distance, greater capacity, and speeds of 100G and beyond a variety of unwanted effects are seriously affecting smooth evolution.

In optical transport network, FEC is getting more and more important as spectral efficiency is increasing. As 100G system is commercialized, there are some trends in the evolution of FEC, for example overhead is increased from 7% to 20% or even more.

High-performance FEC codes are therefore being developed so that higher net coding gain (NCG) and better error correction can be achieved. The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) suggests that soft-decision forward-error correction (SD-FEC) with a redundancy of 20% and beyond be used in a 100G DWDM coherent system.

The use of advanced modulation formats is a promising solution for attaining such high data rates in optical networks. However, as a signal constellation grows in size, so does the optical signal to signal-to-noise ratio it requires to achieve a certain bit error rate (BER). This will degrade the error correction capability.

Decoding is moving from hard to soft. Vendors are developing their own advanced codes instead of using codes recommended by ITU-T. Because different application systems have different decoding performance, latency, power and cost requirements, FEC systems with various transmission overhead, implementation complexity, burst-error correction ability and error floor are available in today’s market. Soft-decision FEC often uses turbo product codes and low density parity check (LDPC) codes.

In research area, new codes such as LDPC codes and their different varieties are introduced into optical communication. Optimized codeword structure and decoding algorithm that provides low BER. LDPC codes can be very powerful, but their practical implementation for optical communications links at ultra-high data rates remains a challenge since the decoding of the code requires soft-decision bits about the received bits. A family of structured codes known as quasi-cyclic LDPC codes, whose common structural properties can be exploited by unified encoding and decoding architectures to reduce the complexity in implementation.

Shishkin N.V., Yurlov A.V., Molchanov I.N., Yudin V.O. Feature of the forward error correction constructions for optical transport networks. Dynamics of complex systems. 2024. V. 18. № 3. P. 34−47. DOI: 10.18127/j19997493-202403-04 (in Russian).

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