Post-FEC performance evaluation of optical SDM systems with mode-dependent loss

This work is focused on the bit error rate (BER) performance of spatial division multiplexing (SDM) systems over an optical channel with mode-dependent loss or gain (collectively referred to in this paper as MDL). When the latter is non-negligible, the BER has a random nature that introduces the outage probability as an important performance metric for the system design and also impacts on the selection of a forward-error correction (FEC) scheme. In MDL-impaired SDM systems, the pre-FEC BER is a random variable whose probability density function (PDF) and coding gain depend on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver input. Hence, the common and simple approach of adding a coding gain factor to the pre-FEC BER to obtain the post-FEC BER is not adequate, and numerical simulations are needed. In this paper, we simulate and analyze the performance in terms of post-FEC BER for two proposals of applying low-density parity check (LDPC) FEC encoder/decoder in a SDM system MDL-impaired and an optimal linear multiple input multiple output (MIMO) receiver. In the first one, the LDPC is applied independently to each mode, and in the second one, the LDPC is applied among all SDM modes. Simulation results indicate that the first proposal outperforms the second. Simplifications in the log-likelihood ratio (LLR) computations have also been considered.