Microelectronic Implementation of Dicode PPM System Employing RS Codes

Optical fibre systems have played a key role in making possible the extraordinary growth in world-wide communications that has occurred in the last 25 years, and are vital in enabling the proliferating use of the Internet. Its high bandwidth capabilities, low attenuation characteristics, low cost, and immunity from the many disturbances that can afflict electrical wires and wireless communication links make it ideal for gigabit transmission and a major building block in the telecommunication infrastructure. A number of different techniques are used for the transmission of digital information between the transmitter and receiver sides in optical fibre system. One type of coding scheme is Pulse Position Modulation (PPM) in which the location of one pulse during 2M time slots is used to convey digital information from M bits. Although all the studies refer to advantages of PPM, it comes at a cost of large bandwidth and a complicated implementation. Therefore, variant PPM schemes have been proposed to transmit the data such as: Multiple Pulse Position Modulation (MPPM), Differential Pulse Position Modulation (DPPM), Pulse Interval Modulation (PIM), Digital Pulse Interval Modulation (DPIM), Dual Header Pulse Interval Modulation (DH-PIM), Dicode Pulse Position Modulation (DiPPM). The DiPPM scheme has been considered as a solution for the bandwidth consumption issue that other existing PPM formats suffer from. This is because it has a line rate that is twice that of the original data rate. DiPPM can be efficiently implemented as it employs two slots to transmit one bit of pulse code modulation (PCM). A PCM conversion from logic zero to logic one provides a pulse in slot RESET (R) and from one to zero provides a pulse in slot SET (S). No pulse is transmitted if the PCM data is unvarying. Like other PPM schemes, DiPPM suffers from three types of pulse detection errors wrong slot, false alarm, and erasure. The aim of this work was to build an error correction system, Reed Solomon (RS) code, which would overcome or reduce the error sources in the DiPPM system. An original mathematical program was developed using the Mathcad software to find the optimum RS parameters which can improve the DiPPM system error performance, number of photons and transmission efficiency. The results showed that the DiPPM system employing RS code offered an improvement over uncoded DiPPM of 5.12 dB, when RS operating at the optimum code rate of approximately ¾ and a codeword length of 25 symbols. Moreover, the error performance of the uncoded DiPPM is compared with the DiPPM system employing maximum likelihood sequence detector (MLSD), and RS code in terms of number of photons per pulse, transmission efficiency, and bandwidth expansion. The DiPPM with RS code offers superior performance compared to the uncoded DiPPM and DiPPM using MLSD, requiring only 4.5x103 photons per pulse when operating at a bandwidth equal to or above 0.9 times the original data rate. Further investigation took place on the DiPPM system employing RS code. A Matlab program and very high speed circuit Hardware Description language (VHDL) were developed to simulate the designed communication system. Simulation results were considered and agreed with the previous DiPPM theory. For the first time, this thesis presents the practical implementation for the DiPPM system employing RS code using Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA).