Error-correcting Codes for Fibre-optic Communication Systems

Electronic signal processing techniques have assumed a prominent role in the design of fibre-optic communication systems. However, state-of-the-art systems operate at per-channel data rates of 100 Gb/s, which constrains the class of communication algorithms that can be practically implemented. Relative to LDPC-like codes, product-like codes with syndrome-based decoding have decoder dataflow requirements that are smaller by more than two orders of magnitude, which strongly motivates the search for powerful product-like codes. This thesis presents a new class of high-rate binary error-correcting codes, staircase codes, whose construction combines ideas from convolutional and block coding. A G.709-compliant staircase code is proposed, and FPGA-based simulation results show that performance within 0.5 dB of the Shannon Limit is attained for bit-error-rates below 1E-15. An error-floor analysis technique is presented, and the G.709-compliant staircase code is shown to have an error floor below 1E-20. Using staircase codes, a pragmatic approach for coded modulation in fibre-optic communication systems is presented that provides reliable communications to within 1 bit/s/Hz of the capacity of a QAM-modulated system modeled via the generalized non-linear Schrodinger equation. A system model for a real-world DQPSK receiver with correlated bit-errors is presented, along with an analysis technique to estimate the resulting error floor for the G.709- compliant staircase code. By applying a time-varying pseudorandom interleaver of size 2040 to the output of the encoder, the error floor of the resulting system is shown to be less than 1E-20.Ph