Blind frame synchronization of Reed–Solomon coded optical transmission systems

It is present in this paper a new blind frame synchronization method for optical packet transmission systems using Reed–Solomon (RS) codes in hard decision situations. The transmitter sends a sequence of RS coded packets without synchronization words to improve the spectral efficiency and the receiver blindly estimates the start position of each packet in the sequence to achieve frame synchronization. The proposed algorithm estimates the synchronization position based on the architecture of RS codes. If the synchronization is not correct, the packets could not form valid RS code words. According to this fact, the proposed algorithm estimates the synchronization position by searching the position that the packets from which contain the lowest error symbols. To estimate the error symbols number for a packet, we calculate the rank of the syndrome matrix which denotes how many errors occurred in a packet. The proposed algorithm is also compared with previous ones and the computer simulations show that our algorithm yields a good result especially on low SNRs.