Block Markov Superposition Transmission of BCH Codes with Iterative Erasures-and-Errors Decoders

In this paper, we present the block Markov superposition transmission of BCH (BMST-BCH) codes, which can be constructed to obtain a very low error floor. To reduce the implementation complexity, we design a low complexity iterative sliding-window decoding algorithm, in which only binary and/or erasure messages are processed and exchanged between processing units. The error floor can be predicted by a genie-aided lower bound, while the waterfall performance can be analyzed by the density evolution method. To evaluate the error floor of the constructed BMST-BCH codes at a very low bit error rate (BER) region, we propose a fast simulation approach. Numerical results show that, at a target BER of $10^{-15}$, the hard-decision decoding of the BMST-BCH codes with overhead $25\%$ can achieve a net coding gain (NCG) of $10.55$ dB. Furthermore, the soft-decision decoding can yield an NCG of $10.74$ dB. The construction of BMST-BCH codes is flexible to trade off latency against performance at all overheads of interest and may find applications in optical transport networks as an attractive~candidate.