FEC Performance Analysis Based on Poisson and Bursty Error Patterns for SDH and OTN Systems

This paper analyses and compares the performance of International Telecommunication Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) recommended forward error correction (FEC) for the Synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) system and the newly ratified Optical transport network (OTN) system. The analysis and comparison are based on simulation results using Poisson and bursty error patterns. While a Poisson error pattern is a commonly studied environment for these systems, a bursty error pattern is not. The simulation results show that the FEC for both SDH and OTN support Poisson errors well. However, for bursty errors, it is found that the FEC for SDH does not work well, while the FEC for OTN is working well for short burst length only.