Postdoc on High-Speed Error-Correcting Codes and Signal Shaping

Hiring one postdoctoral researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology for up to 1.5 years. The candidate must have a PhD degree in information and/or communications theory, signal processing, or computer science. A strong background on FPGA programming is highly desirable. Affinity with physical layer (including channel coding and/or constellations shaping) is beneficial, but not mandatory.

Fibre optics are critical infrastructure for society as they carry nearly all the global Internet traffic. Over the last years, we have seen an explosive increase of data rates in fibre optics. For instance, in the short-haul domain, the traffic between data centers experienced a 400% growth from 2016 to 2021. This growth is a challenge not only to the technology demands but also to energy consumption. A single state-of-the-art optical transponder can reach a total power consumption of 700W. Applying Soft-Decision Forward Error Correction (SD-FEC) decoders would be superior in such multi-gigabit per second systems, but their power consumption is up to two orders of magnitude higher than Hard-Decision Forward Error Correction (HD-FEC) decoders. However, choosing the technology with better energy efficiency comes with a cost: HD-FEC decoders entail a significant performance loss, which will prevent the use of HD-FEC decoders in ultra-high-throughput fiber optics. More broadly, such drawbacks will also make HD-FEC decoders impractical for beyond 5G mobile communications and future wireless local area network (WiFi-like) standards. In order not to increase power consumption of future high-throughput communication systems further, the error correction algorithms need to be replaced with completely new approaches.

Recently proposed hybrid FEC (HY-FEC) systems, e.g., SABM, iBDD-SR, SABM-SR, iBDD-CR, etc., tackle the challenge above by combining flavors from high-performance SD-FEC and from low-power HD-FEC [1-4]. At an algorithm level, HY-FEC is able to close the performance gap between SD-FEC and HD-FEC, but with at least one order of magnitude lower energy consumption than that of SD-FEC. Furthermore, next-generation communication systems use high-order constellations. Approximately-realized constellation shaping (SH) techniques, applied to high-order constellations, have been shown to provide higher data rates than uniform signaling approaches, with low-complexity (LC) [5-7]. Investigating the performance of LC-SH / HY-FEC combinations is the core of this project, and a corresponding FPGA implementation is the key objective of this position.

[1] Y. Lei, B. Chen, G. Liga, X. Deng, Z. Cao, J. Li, K. Xu and A. Alvarado, ``Improved Decoding of Staircase Codes: The Soft-Aided Bit-Marking (SABM) Algorithm,’’ in �ۿ۴�ý Trans. on Commun., vol. 67, no. 12, pp. 8220-8232, Dec. 2019.
[2] G. Liga, A. Sheikh and A. Alvarado, ``A novel soft-aided bit-marking decoder for product codes,’’ in Proc. Eur. Conf. Opt. Commun., Dublin, Ireland, 2019.
[3] A. Sheikh, A. Graell i Amat, G. Liva and A. Alvarado, ``Refined Reliability Combining for Binary Message Passing Decoding of Product Codes,’’ May 2020.
[4] A. Sheikh, A. Graell i Amat and A. Alvarado, ``Novel High-Throughput Decoding Algorithms for Product and Staircase Codes based onError-and-Erasure Decoding,’’ Aug. 2020.
[5] Y. C. Gültekin, F. M. J. Willems, W. J. van Houtum, and S. Şerbetli, ``Approximate enumerative sphere shaping,’’ in Proc. �ۿ۴�ý Int. Symp. Inf. Theory, Vail, CO, USA, Jun. 2018, pp. 676–680.
[6] Y. C. Gültekin, W. J. van Houtum, A. Koppelaar, and F. M. J. Willems, ``Partial enumerative sphere shaping,’’ in Proc. �ۿ۴�ý Veh. Technol. Conf. (Fall), Honolulu, HI, USA, Sep. 2019.
[7] Y. C. Gültekin, W. J. van Houtum, A. G. C. Koppelaar, and F. M. J. Willems, ``Low-complexity enumerative coding techniques with applications to amplitude shaping,’’ �ۿ۴�ý Commun. Lett., Sep. 2020.

Academic and Research Environment

Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) is one of Europe’s top technological universities, situated in the heart of one of Europe’s largest high-tech innovation ecosystems. Research at TU/e is characterized by a combination of academic excellence and a strong real-world impact. This impact is often obtained via close collaboration with high-tech industries.

This exciting research will be carried out at the signal processing systems (SPS) group, in particular, in the Information and Communication Theory Lab (ICT Lab), which is a world-leading group on the topic of information and communication theory. Our research in the topic of fiber optics is also carried out in close collaboration with the electro-optical communications (ECO) group, as well as with industrial partners both groups collaborate with.

For More Details See

http://www.tue.nl/en/research/research-groups/information-and-communication-theory-lab/
http://www.research.tue.nl/en/organisations/information-and-communication-theory-lab/
http://www.tue.nl/en/research/research-groups/electro-optical-communication/
http:// www.sps.tue.nl/ictla