A novel super-FEC code based on concatenated code for high-speed long-haul optical communication systems

Abstract The structures of the novel super forward error correction (Super-FEC) code type based on the concatenated code for high-speed long-haul optical communication systems are studied in this paper. The Reed–Solomon (RS) (255, 239) + Bose–Chaudhuri–Hocguenghem (BCH) (1023, 963) concatenated code is presented after the characteristics of the concatenated code and the two Super-FEC code type presented in ITU-T G.975.1 have theoretically been analyzed, the simulation result shows that this novel code type, compared with the RS (255, 239) + convolutional-self-orthogonal-code (CSOC) ( k 0 / n 0  = 6/7,  J  = 8) code in ITU-T G.975.1, has a lower redundancy and better error-correction capabilities, and its net coding gain (NCG) at the third iteration is 0.57 dB more than that of RS (255, 239) + CSOC ( k 0 / n 0  = 6/7,  J  = 8) code in ITU-T G.975.1 at the third iteration for the bit error rate (BER) of 10 −12 . Therefore, the novel code type can better be used in long-haul, larger capacity and higher bit-rate optical communication systems. Furthermore, the design and implementation of the novel concatenated code type are also discussed.