PMD mitigation through interleaving LDPC codes with polarization scramblers

Author-Highlights
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• A novel PMD mitigation scheme with LDPC codes and polarization scramblers was proposed.
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• The optimal scrambling speed of the chosen LDPC codes was investigated.
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• To implement into the real LSI, the practical number of iterations in decoding LDPC codes is discussed.
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• PMD tolerance of LDPC codes is much more enhanced compared to RS code and can reach a better BER performance than that.

The combination of forward error correction (FEC) and distributed fast polarization scramblers (D-FPSs) is approved an effective method to mitigate polarization mode dispersion (PMD) in high-speed optical fiber communication system. The low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes are newly introduced into the PMD mitigation scheme with D-FPSs in this article as one of the promising FEC codes to achieve better performance. The scrambling speed of FPS for LDPC (2040, 1903) codes system is discussed, and the reasonable speed 10 MHz is obtained from the simulation results. For easy application in practical large scale integrated (LSI) circuit, the number of iterations in decoding LDPC codes is also investigated. The PMD tolerance and cut-off optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of LDPC codes are compared with Reed–Solomon (RS) codes in different conditions. In the simulation, the interleaving LDPC codes bring incremental performance of error correction, and the PMD tolerance is 10 ps at OSNR=11.4 dB. The results show the meaning of the work is that LDPC codes are a substitute for traditional RS codes with D-FPSs and all of the executable code files are open for researchers who have practical LSI platform for PMD mitigation.