A Class of Tiled Diagonal Zipper Codes With Multiple Chains

Tiled diagonal zipper codes (TDZCs) are shown to be a class of competitive forward error correction codes in modern optical fiber communication systems. This paper introduces the multichain tiled diagonal zipper codes (MC-TDZCs) in which multiple TDZC chains are coupled together in a cyclic manner. Firstly, we present the encoding and decoding algorithms of the proposed MC-TDZCs. Secondly, we analyze the graphical structures of the minimum stall patterns of the MC-TDZCs using directed graphs. Thirdly, we derive the multiplicities of these minimum stall patterns. The analytical results show that the size of the minimum-sized stall patterns of the proposed MC-TDZCs is larger than that of the underlying TDZC counterpart. Finally, we present simulation results to show the performance advantages of the proposed MC-TDZCs under the constraint of equal storage size for decoding. Particularly, a rate 0.94 MC-TDZC with four chains shows more than four orders of magnitude improvement in bit error rates compared to its underlying TDZC counterpart.