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Forward Error Correction

Details are subject to change.

  • Instructor

    Laurent Schmalen, KIT, Germany

  • Day & Time

    20.09.2022, 13:30 – 17:30

  • Location

    Room Guangzhou

  • Description

    This course is intended for engineers and students who would like to get a background in the basic concepts in forward error correction techniques but would like to take a deeper outlook into the modern concepts and technologies that are employed in today’s high-speed optical communication systems. The course is intended to give participants insights on the selection of FEC schemes for different applications and the understanding of LDPC-based FEC schemes, which form one of the most popular coding schemes in optical communications these days.

    Some of the topics covered in the course are:

    1. Recapitulation of basic concepts of forward error correction (FEC)
    2. Hard-decision decoding versus soft-decision decoding
      1. Basic concepts, potential gains and possible limitations
      2. Guidelines for decoding method selection depending on application
    3. Applying forward error correction in optical transmission experiments
      1. Performance characterization using information theoretic methods
      2. Performance evaluation using real decoders
    4. In-depth treatment of modern FEC schemes
      1. Product codes and staircase codes for hard-decision decoding
      2. Concatenated coding schemes
      3. LDPC codes for soft- and hard-decision decoding
        1. Common designs of parity-check matrices, e.g., Quasi-Cyclic (QC) codes
        2. Decoding LDPC codes – algorithms for soft-decision and hard-decision decoding
        3. Decoding LDPC codes – hardware implementation aspects
        4. Simulation of LDPC codes on FPGAs for error floor analysis