In this paper, we discuss and present some recent advances in the field of error correcting codes and discuss their applicability for lightwave transmission systems. We introduce several classes of spatially coupled codes and discuss several design options for spatially coupled codes and show how rapidly decodable codes can be constructed by careful selection of the degree distribution. We confirm the good performance of some spatially coupled codes at very low bit error rates using an FPGA-based simulation. Finally, we compare all proposed schemes and show how spatially coupled Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes outperform conventional LDPC and polar codes with similar receiver complexity and memory requirements.

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Abstract-In this paper, we highlight the class of spatially coupled codes and discuss their applicability to long-haul and submarine optical communication systems. We first demonstrate how to optimize irregular spatially coupled LDPC codes for their use in optical communications with limited decoding hardware complexity and then present simulation results with an FPGAbased decoder where we show that very low error rates can be achieved and that conventional block-based LDPC codes can be outperformed. In the second part of the paper, we focus on the combination of spatially coupled LDPC codes with different demodulators and detectors, important for future systems with adaptive modulation and for varying channel characteristics. We demonstrate that SC codes can be employed as universal, channel-agnostic coding schemes.