Reusing Common Uncoded Experimental Data in Performance Estimation of Different FEC Codes

In this letter, we present a method for performance estimation of forward error correction (FEC) codes using off-line data without data encoding. Only a few hundred thousand uncoded symbols are used to accurately evaluate post-FEC bit error rate of soft FEC codes decodable by the sum-product algorithm at very low error rates, e.g., 10^-8 which is only limited by computer performance and simulation time. The method is applicable to both single and concatenated codes. The demonstration is carried out in optical 128-Gb/s polarization division multiplexed experiments with differentially encoded data and 20% redundancy quasi cyclic low-density parity check code.