Error correction for short-range optical interconnect using COTS transceivers

Nowadays, quantities of commercial off-the-shelf(COTS) optical transceivers are widely equipped in both exiting and abuilding data centers. As data centers are becoming larger and containing more servers, the method to ensure longer and steady transmission with COTS optical transceivers becomes one of the key issues. Meanwhile, variations in the manufacturing of COTS optical transceivers bring in fluctuation of packet error rate(PER) in communication. In this paper, we present an application layer adaptive forward error correction(AL-AFEC) coding scheme for COTS optical transceivers in optical interconnect to solve the problems mentioned above and test its performance in a 10 Gbps Ethernet(10 GbE)link using 10 GBASE-SR SFP+ modules. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme enables longer transmission distance and the instability introduced by manufactural variations is well settled. Since our scheme requires no extra hardware on optical transceivers, it is a considerable low-cost alternative to improve system reliability and achieve longer transmission distance for COTS optical transceivers.