Simulations and Experiments on the Effective Optical Gain of FEC in a GPON Uplink

This letter studies the effective optical gain of Reed-Solomon (RS) forward-error correction (FEC) in a burst-mode gigabit passive optical network (GPON) uplink. Numerical simulations are made of the performance of an RS (255, 239) FEC code. For the first time, FEC performance is measured in a 1.25-Gb/s burst-mode GPON uplink in the presence of mode partition noise (MPN). Measurements show that the effective optical gain of RS (255, 239) can be considerably higher than 2.7 dB when MPN dominates