Channel coding for coherent lightwave binary FSK communications

Abstract

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of several channel coding schemes for a weakly coherent optical communications system that employs binary Frequency-ShiftKeying. For the detection of signals, a double-filtering receiver structure is considered. Our numerical results, computed for BCH codes, Reed-Solomon codes, convolutional codes and a concatenated code, show that coding can provide a very economical solution for greatly improving the performance of such a system and for making it widely tolerant to laser phase noise.