ERROR-CORRECTION CODING FOR HIGH-SPEED OPTICAL-TRANSMISSION SYSTEMS BASED ON THE SYNCHRONOUS DIGITAL HIERARCHY

The quality objectives given in the CCITT recommendations concerning f iber optics transmission over the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH) network are difficult to achieve in high-speed systems. Equipment impe rfections often result in a Bit Error Rate (BER) floor above the recom mended BER value of 10(-14). In this paper we propose a simple Reed So lomon (RS) coding scheme for the Synchronous Transport Module level-1 (STM-1) frame which leads to a substantial BER performance improvement over uncoded systems. The RS code proposed is a shortened one-symbol- correcting code. Experimental results obtained with a laboratory proto type are reported which show that this code reduces the BER floor by f our orders of magnitude.