Design and Implementation of Long High-Rate QC-LDPC Codes and Its Applications to Optical Transmission Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel class of long quasi-cyclic low-density parity-check (QC-LDPC) codes. Each of the codes in this class has a structure formed by concatenating single-parity-check codes and QC-LDPC codes of shorter lengths, which allows for efficient, high throughput encoder/decoder implementations. Using a code in this class, we design a forward error correction (FEC) scheme for optical transmission systems and present its high throughput encoder/decoder architecture. In order to demonstrate its feasibility, we implement the architecture on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. We show by both FPGA-based simulations and measurements of an optical transmission system that the FEC scheme can achieve excellent error performance and that there is no significant performance degradation due to the constraint on its structure while getting an efficient, high throughput implementation is feasible.