Experimental investigation at 42.7-Gb/s of the Burst Error Correction Ability of Reed-Solomon and Enhanced Forward Error Codes

We experimentally investigate the performances of two 42.7- Gb/s forward error correction (FEC) codes, Read-Solomon FEC (RS-FEC) and enhanced FEC (E-FEC), in the presence of burst errors. We describe a novel technique to emulate error bursts with various burst length and duty cycle. Using a commercially available evaluation kit that is equipped with RS-FEC and E- FEC, we observe that the coding gains of the two FEC codes are greatly reduced by long error bursts with low duty cycle. A correlation between the FEC performance and the FEC burst error correction length is clearly shown. In addition, the measurement also shows an increase in coding gain in cases with certain short error bursts as compared to the reference case with additive white Gaussian noise.