Synchronization for capacity -approaching coded communication systems

The dissertation concentrates on synchronization of capacity approaching error-correction codes that are deployed in noisy channels with very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The major topics are symbol timing synchronization and frame synchronization.;Capacity-approaching error-correction codes, like turbo codes and low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes, are capable of reaching very low bit error rates and frame error rates in noisy channels by iterative decoding. To fully achieve the potential decoding capability of Turbo codes and LDPC codes, proper symbol timing synchronization, frame synchronization and channel state estimation are required. The dissertation proposes a joint estimator of symbol time delay and channel SNR for symbol timing recovery, and a maximum a posteriori (MAP) frame synchronizer for frame synchronization.;Symbol timing recovery is implemented by sampling and interpolation. The received signal is sampled multiple times per symbol period with unknown delay and unknown SNR. A joint estimator estimates the time delay and the SNR. The signal is rebuilt by interpolating available samples using estimated time delay. The intermediate decoding results enable decision-feedback estimation. The estimates of time delay and SNR are refined by iterative processing. This refinement improves the system performance significantly.;Usually the sampling rate is assumed to be a strict integer multiple of the symbol rate. However, in a practical system the local oscillators in the transmitter and the receiver may have random drifts. Therefore the sampling rate is no longer an exact multiple of the symbol rate, and the sampling time follows a random walk. This random walk may harm the system performance severely. The dissertation analyzes the effect of random time walks and proposes to mitigate the effect by overlapped sliding windows and iterative processing.;Frame synchronization is required to find the correct boundaries of codewords. MAP frame synchronization in the sense of minimizing the frame sync failure rate is investigated. The MAP frame synchronizer explores low-density parity-check attributes of the capacity-approaching codes. The accuracy of frame synchronization is adequate for considered coded systems to work reliably under very low SNR

Design tradeoffs and challenges in practical coherent optical transceiver implementations

This tutorial discusses the design and ASIC implementation of coherent optical transceivers. Algorithmic and architectural options and tradeoffs between performance and complexity/power dissipation are presented. Particular emphasis is placed on flexible (or reconfigurable) transceivers because of their importance as building blocks of software-defined optical networks. The paper elaborates on some advanced digital signal processing (DSP) techniques such as iterative decoding, which are likely to be applied in future coherent transceivers based on higher order modulations. Complexity and performance of critical DSP blocks such as the forward error correction decoder and the frequency-domain bulk chromatic dispersion equalizer are analyzed in detail. Other important ASIC implementation aspects including physical design, signal and power integrity, and design for testability, are also discussed.Fil: Morero, Damián Alfonso. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales; Argentina. ClariPhy Argentina S.A.; ArgentinaFil: Castrillon, Alejandro. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales; ArgentinaFil: Aguirre, Alejandro. ClariPhy Argentina S.A.; ArgentinaFil: Hueda, Mario Rafael. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Córdoba. Instituto de Estudios Avanzados en Ingeniería y Tecnología. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Instituto de Estudios Avanzados en Ingeniería y Tecnología; ArgentinaFil: Agazzi, Oscar Ernesto. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales; Argentina. ClariPhy Argentina S.A.; Argentin

Study of phase noise in optical coherent systems

Le bruit de phase est un problème important dans la conception de systèmes cohérents optiques. Bien que le bruit de phase soit étudié énormément dans les communications sans fil, certains aspects de bruit de phase sont nouveaux dans des systèmes cohérents optiques. Dans cette thèse, nous explorons les statistiques de bruit de phase dans les systèmes optiques cohérentes et proposons une nouvelle technique pour améliorer la robustesse du système envers le bruit de phase. Notre première contribution traite de l’étude des statistiques de bruit de phase en présence de compensation électronique de la dispersion chromatique (CD) dans des systèmes cohérents. Nous montrons que le modèle proposé précédemment pour l’interaction de CD avec bruit de phase doit être modifié à cause d’un modèle trop simple pour la récupération de phase. Nous dérivons une expression plus précise pour le bruit de phase estimé par la récupération de phase avec décision dirigée (DD), et utilisons cette expression pour modifier les statistiques de décision pour les symboles reçus. Nous calculons le taux d’erreur binaire (BER) pour le format de transmission DQPSK semi-analytiquement en utilisant nos statistiques de décision modifiées et montrons que pour la récupération de phase idéale, le BER semi-analytique est bien assorti avec le BER simulé avec la technique Monte-Carlo (MC). Notre deuxième contribution est l’adaptation d’une technique de codage MLCM pour les systèmes cohérents limités par le bruit de phase et le bruit blanc additif Gaussien (AWGN). Nous montrons que la combinaison d’une constellation optimisée pour le bruit de phase avec MLCM offre un système robuste à complexité modérée. Nous vérifions que la performance de MLCM dans des systèmes cohérents avec constellations 16-aires se détériorés par le bruit de phase non-linéaire et de Wiener. Pour le bruit de phase non-linéaire, notre conception de MLCM démontre une performance supérieure par rapport àune conception de MLCM déjà présente dans la littérature. Pour le bruit de phase de Wiener, nous comparons deux format de transmission, constellations carrées et optimisée pour bruit de phase, et deux techniques de codage, MLCM et codage à débit uniforme. Nos résultats expérimentaux pour BER après codage suivent les mêmes tendances que le BER simulé et confirment notre conception.Phase noise is an important issue in designing today’s optical coherent systems. Although phase noise is studied heavily in wireless communications, some aspects of phase noise are novel in optical coherent systems. In this thesis we explore phase noise statistics in optical coherent systems and propose a novel technique to increase system robustness toward phase noise. Our first contribution deals with the study of phase noise statistics in the presence of electronic chromatic dispersion (CD) compensation in coherent systems. We show that previously proposed model for phase noise and CD interaction must be modified due to an overly simple model of carrier phase recovery. We derive a more accurate expression for the estimated phase noise of decision directed (DD) carrier phase recovery, and use this expression to modify the decision statistics of received symbols. We calculate bit error rate (BER) of a differential quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK) system semi-analytically using our modified decision statistics and show that for ideal DD carrier phase recovery the semi-analytical BER matches the BER simulated via Monte-Carlo (MC) technique. We show that the semi-analytical BER is a lower bound of simulated BER from Viterbi-Viterbi (VV) carrier phase recovery for a wide range of practical system parameters. Our second contribution is concerned with adapting a multi-level coded modulation (MLCM) technique for phase noise and additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) limited coherent system. We show that the combination of a phase noise optimized constellation with MLCM offers a phase-noise robust system at moderate complexity. We propose a numerical method to design set-partitioning (mapping bits to symbols) and optimizing code rates for minimum block error rate (BLER).We verify MLCM performance in coherent systems of 16-ary constellations impaired by nonlinear and Wiener phase noise. For nonlinear phase noise, superior performance of our MLCM design over a previously designed MLCM system is demonstrated in terms of BLER. For Wiener phase noise, we compare optimized and square 16-QAM constellations assuming either MLCM or uniform rate coding. We compare post forward error correction (FEC) BER in addition to BLER by both simulation and experiment and show that superior BLER performance is translated into post FEC BER. Our experimental post FEC BER results follow the same trends as simulated BER, validating our design

A theoretical framework for soft-information-based synchronization in iterative (Turbo) receivers

This contribution considers turbo synchronization, that is to say, the use of soft data information to estimate parameters like carrier phase, frequency, or timing offsets of a modulated signal within an iterative data demodulator. In turbo synchronization, the receiver exploits the soft decisions computed at each turbo decoding iteration to provide a reliable estimate of some signal parameters. The aim of our paper is to show that such “turbo-estimation” approach can be regarded as a special case of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm. This leads to a general theoretical framework for turbo synchronization that allows to derive parameter estimation procedures for carrier phase and frequency offset, as well as for timing offset and signal amplitude. The proposed mathematical framework is illustrated by simulation results reported for the particular case of carrier phase and frequency offsets estimation of a turbo-coded 16-QAM signal

Optical Time-Frequency Packing: Principles, Design, Implementation, and Experimental Demonstration

Time-frequency packing (TFP) transmission provides the highest achievable spectral efficiency with a constrained symbol alphabet and detector complexity. In this work, the application of the TFP technique to fiber-optic systems is investigated and experimentally demonstrated. The main theoretical aspects, design guidelines, and implementation issues are discussed, focusing on those aspects which are peculiar to TFP systems. In particular, adaptive compensation of propagation impairments, matched filtering, and maximum a posteriori probability detection are obtained by a combination of a butterfly equalizer and four 8-state parallel Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) detectors. A novel algorithm that ensures adaptive equalization, channel estimation, and a proper distribution of tasks between the equalizer and BCJR detectors is proposed. A set of irregular low-density parity-check codes with different rates is designed to operate at low error rates and approach the spectral efficiency limit achievable by TFP at different signal-to-noise ratios. An experimental demonstration of the designed system is finally provided with five dual-polarization QPSK-modulated optical carriers, densely packed in a 100 GHz bandwidth, employing a recirculating loop to test the performance of the system at different transmission distances.Comment: This paper has been accepted for publication in the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technolog

Synchronization in digital communication systems: performance bounds and practical algorithms

Communication channels often transfer signals from different transmitters. To avoid interference the available frequency spectrum is divided into non-overlapping frequency bands (bandpass channels) and each transmitter is assigned to a different bandpass channel. The transmission of a signal over a bandpass channel requires a shift of its frequency-content to a frequency range that is compatible with the designated frequency band (modulation). At the receiver, the modulated signal is demodulated (frequency shifted back to the original frequency band) in order to recover the original signal. The modulation/demodulation process requires the presence of a locally generated sinusoidal signal at both the transmitter and the receiver. To enable a reliable information transfer, it is imperative that these two sinusoids are accurately synchronized. Recently, several powerful channel codes have been developed which enable reliable communication at a very low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). A by-product of these developments is that synchronization must now be performed at a SNR that is lower than ever before. Of course, this imposes high requirements on the synchronizer design. This doctoral thesis investigates to what extent (performance bounds) and in what way (practical algorithms) the structure that the channel code enforces upon the transmitted signal can be exploited to improve the synchronization accuracy at low SNR

A Hardware Implementation of a Coherent SOQPSK-TG Demodulator for FEC Applications

This thesis presents a hardware design of a coherent demodulator for shaped offset quadrature phase shift keying, telemetry group version (SOQPSK-TG) for use in forward error correction (FEC) applications. Implementation details for data sequence detection, symbol timing synchronization, carrier phase synchronization, and block recovery are described. This decision-directed demodulator is based on maximum likelihood principles, and is efficiently implemented by the soft output Viterbi algorithm (SOVA). The design is intended for use in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Simulation results of the demodulator's performance in the additive white Gaussian noise channel are compared with a Matlab reference model that is known to be correct. In addition, hardware-specific parameters are presented. Finally, suggestions for future work and improvements are discussed