Abstract: Consistent with the present disclosure, multiple forward error correction (FEC) encoders are provided for encoding a respective one of a plurality of data streams. A mechanism is provided to mix or interleave portions of the encoded data such that each subcarrier carries information associated with each data stream, as opposed to each subcarrier carrying information associated with only a corresponding one of the data streams. As a result, both higher SNR and low SNR optical subcarriers carry such information, such that errors occurring during transmission are distributed and not concentrated or limited to information associated with a single data stream. Accordingly, at the receive end, each FEC decoder decodes information having a similar overall error rate. By balancing the error rates across each FEC encoder/decoder pair, the overall ability to correct errors improves compared to a system in which mixing or interleaving is not carried out.

Abstract: Data samples are filtered by using a digital filter where the length of an impulse response of the digital filter is finite, an impulse response of the digital filter is symmetric and the operation of the digital filter is multi-rate. The method uses a polyphase decomposition to break down the input data stream into N parallel substreams and the multi-rate digital filter is separated by a polyphase decomposition into multiple lower-rate sub-filters where each of the sub-filters is separated into a set of simpler sub-sub-filters which operate upon the same set of input samples and which have impulse responses which are jointly centro-symmetric, a set of pre-filtering arithmetic structures, and a set of post-filtering arithmetic structures and performing each such pair of sub-sub-filtering operations using a single shared filter structure, a set of pre-filtering combining adders, and a set of post-filtering separating adders.

Abstract: Data samples are filtered by using a digital filter where the length of an impulse response of the digital filter is finite, an impulse response of the digital filter is symmetric and the operation of the digital filter is multi-rate. The method uses a polyphase decomposition to break down the input data stream into N parallel substreams and the multi-rate digital filter is separated by a polyphase decomposition into multiple lower-rate sub-filters where each of the sub-filters is separated into a set of simpler sub-sub-filters which operate upon the same set of input samples and which have impulse responses which are jointly centro-symmetric, a set of pre-filtering arithmetic structures, and a set of post-filtering arithmetic structures and performing each such pair of sub-sub-filtering operations using a single shared filter structure, a set of pre-filtering combining adders, and a set of post-filtering separating adders.