Estimation of Soft FEC Performance in Optical Transmission Experiments
15 October 2011
We investigate the feasibility of using hard-decision bit error rates or, alternatively, mutual information, both measured before a soft input forward error correction decoder, as a means to estimate performance after soft-decision decoding. Both methods are compared based on a large set of measurement data. We conclude that mutual information seems to be the more reliable measure to estimate soft-decision FEC performance.
