Analysis and Comparison of FEC Schemes for 200GbE and 400GbE

This article discusses FEC schemes for next generation 200 Gb/s and 400 Gb/s Ethernet being defined by IEEE P802.3bs. Performance, latency, and complexity are analyzed by developing application-specific error models. The 200GbE and 400GbE consists of optical and electrical link segments. Therefore, FEC needs to overcome error floor caused by optical modules as well as burst errors of electrical links. Various interleaving schemes, including FEC orthogonal multiplexing (FOM) and FEC pre-interleaving schemes, are proposed to achieve link efficiency and solve deployment issues. For the first time, FEC interleaving schemes are determined to be included in IEEE P802.3 standards.