FPGA-based rate-adaptive LDPC-coded modulation for the next generation of optical communication systems

In this paper, we propose a rate-adaptive FEC scheme based on LDPC codes together with its software reconfigurable unified FPGA architecture. By FPGA emulation, we demonstrate that the proposed class of rate-adaptive LDPC codes based on shortening with an overhead from 25% to 42.9% provides a coding gain ranging from 13.08 dB to 14.28 dB at a post-FEC BER of 10(-15) for BPSK transmission. In addition, the proposed rate-adaptive LDPC coding combined with higher-order modulations have been demonstrated including QPSK, 8-QAM, 16-QAM, 32-QAM, and 64-QAM, which covers a wide range of signal-to-noise ratios. Furthermore, we apply the unequal error protection by employing different LDPC codes on different bits in 16-QAM and 64-QAM, which results in additional 0.5dB gain compared to conventional LDPC coded modulation with the same code rate of corresponding LDPC code. (C) 2016 Optical Society of AmericaNational Science Foundation (NSF) CIAN ERC [EEC-0812072]; ONR MURI program [N00014-13-1-0627]This item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at repository@u.library.arizona.edu