Novel High-Throughput Decoding Algorithms for Product and Staircase Codes based on Error-and-Erasure Decoding

Product codes (PCs) and staircase codes (SCCs) are conventionally decoded based on bounded distance decoding (BDD) of the component codes and iterating between row and column decoders. The performance of iterative BDD (iBDD) can be improved using soft-aided (hybrid) algorithms. Among these, iBDD with combined reliability (iBDD-CR) has been recently proposed for PCs, yielding sizeable performance gains at the expense of a minor increase in complexity compared to iBDD. In this paper, we first extend iBDD-CR to SCCs. We then propose two novel decoding algorithms for PCs and SCCs which improve upon iBDD-CR. The new algorithms use an extra decoding attempt based on error and erasure decoding of the component codes. The proposed algorithms require only the exchange of hard messages between component decoders, making them an attractive solution for ultra high-throughput fiber-optic systems. Simulation results show that our algorithms based on two decoding attempts achieve gains of up to $0.88$ dB for both PCs and SCCs. This corresponds to a $33\%$ optical reach enhancement over iBDD with bit-interleaved coded modulation using $256$ quadrature amplitude modulation

Refined Reliability Combining for Binary Message Passing Decoding of Product Codes

We propose a novel soft-aided iterative decoding algorithm for product codes (PCs). The proposed algorithm, named iterative bounded distance decoding with combined reliability (iBDD-CR), enhances the conventional iterative bounded distance decoding (iBDD) of PCs by exploiting some level of soft information. In particular, iBDD-CR can be seen as a modification of iBDD where the hard decisions of the row and column decoders are made based on a reliability estimate of the BDD outputs. The reliability estimates are derived using extrinsic message passing for generalized low-density-parity check (GLDPC) ensembles, which encompass PCs. We perform a density evolution analysis of iBDD-CR for transmission over the additive white Gaussian noise channel for the GLDPC ensemble. We consider both binary transmission and bit-interleaved coded modulation with quadrature amplitude modulation.We show that iBDD-CR achieves performance gains up to $0.51$ dB compared to iBDD with the same internal decoder data flow. This makes the algorithm an attractive solution for very high-throughput applications such as fiber-optic communications