Reconfigurable FEC codes for software-defined optical transceivers

Flexible Optical Networks can optimize the network resources by offering increased spectral utilization. However, these networks require the use of novel software-defined Optical Transceivers that can adapt their features to the channel's requirements. This paper presents a novel optical transceiver architecture using a reconfigurable FEC coding scheme for flexible optical networks. The proposed approach can dynamically support different versions of FEC codes (with different overheads, code lengths, and LLR-widths) based on the network's Quality-of-Service requirements, whereas it can also be applied for the dynamic reconfiguration of the DSP units and the realization of dynamic coded-modulation schemes. The proposed approach has been implemented into an FPGA platform. The performance evaluation shows that the reconfiguration time is always less than 12 ms, which means that the proposed scheme could be utilized in many optical networks, where the reconfiguration time (e.g. for the optical switches or the WSS) is in the order of a few ms.