Sub-Block Rearranged Staircase Codes for Optical Transport Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces sub-block rearranged staircase (SR-staircase) codes, a new family of spatially coupled product codes that improve performance in optical transport networks by using rearranged sub-blocks and larger coupling widths.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel SR-staircase code construction that allows for smaller code blocks with the same rate, and demonstrates improved performance through analysis and simulations.

Findings

Enhanced error floor performance with larger coupling width

Comparable or improved performance using strong component codes

Validated improvements via density evolution and simulations

Abstract

We propose a new family of spatially coupled product codes, called sub-block rearranged staircase (SR-staircase) codes. Each SR-staircase code block is constructed by encoding rearranged preceding code blocks and new information blocks, where the rearrangement involves sub-blocks decomposition and transposition. The proposed codes can be constructed to have each code block size of $1/q$ to that of the conventional staircase codes while having the same rate and component codes, for any positive integer $q$. In this regard, we can use strong algebraic component codes to construct SR-staircase codes with a similar or the same code block size and rate as staircase codes with weak component codes. Moreover, both waterfall and error floor performance can be further improved by using a large coupling width. The superior performance of the proposed codes is demonstrated through density evolution and error floor analysis as well as simulation.