Improved Decoding of Staircase Codes: The Soft-aided Bit-marking (SABM) Algorithm

Abstract

Staircase codes (SCCs) are typically decoded using iterative bounded-distance decoding (BDD) and hard decisions. In this paper, a novel decoding algorithm is proposed, which partially uses soft information from the channel. The proposed algorithm is based on marking certain number of highly reliable and highly unreliable bits. These marked bits are used to improve the miscorrection-detection capability of the SCC decoder and the error-correcting capability of BDD. For SCCs with $2$-error-correcting Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem component codes, our algorithm improves upon standard SCC decoding by up to $0.30$~dB at a bit-error rate (BER) of $10^{-7}$. The proposed algorithm is shown to achieve almost half of the gain achievable by an idealized decoder with this structure. A complexity analysis based on the number of additional calls to the component BDD decoder shows that the relative complexity increase is only around $4\%$ at a BER of $10^{-4}$. This additional complexity is shown to decrease as the channel quality improves. Our algorithm is also extended (with minor modifications) to product codes. The simulation results show that in this case, the algorithm offers gains of up to $0.44$~dB at a BER of $10^{-8}$.

arXiv comment10 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (6)

• Staircase Codes: FEC for 100 Gb/s OTN
• Low-Complexity Concatenated LDPC-Staircase Codes
• Improved Decoding and Error Floor Analysis of Staircase Codes
• Decoding Staircase Codes with Marked Bits
• Stall Pattern Avoidance in Polynomial Product Codes
• Improving HD-FEC decoding via bit marking

Cited by in corpus (9)

• Zipper Codes
• Novel High-Throughput Decoding Algorithms for Product and Staircase Codes based on Error-and-Erasure Decoding
• One and Two Bit Message Passing for SC-LDPC Codes with Higher-Order Modulation
• Refined Reliability Combining for Binary Message Passing Decoding of Product Codes
• Improved Soft-aided Decoding of Product Codes with Dynamic Reliability Scores
• A Soft-Aided Staircase Decoder Using Three-Level Channel Reliabilities
• 30% Reach Increase via Low-complexity Hybrid HD/SD FEC and Nonlinearity-tolerant 4D Modulation
• Improving HD-FEC decoding via bit marking
• On Parameter Optimization and Reach Enhancement for the Improved Soft-Aided Staircase Decoder