High-Efficiency Error Correction for Photon Counting

Abstract

Pulse-position modulation (PPM) using a photon-counting receiver produces an extremely sensitive optical communications system, capable of transmitting multiple bits of information for each received photon. Such impressive sensitivity requires powerful error-correction codes that must be computationally efficient to enable high data throughput. Fountain codes combine performance and efficiency for a narrow class of channels, known as erasure channels. A potential application for fountain codes is the photon-counting PPM receiver, which is an approximate erasure channel and includes occasional channel errors. This non-ideal behavior requires a nontraditional use of fountain codes. With a carefully constructed architecture, fountain codes provide the desired efficient error correction to the photon-counting PPM receiver.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2010
Accession Number
AD1014874

Entities

People

  • Andrew S. Fletcher

Organizations

  • MIT Lincoln Laboratory

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Chain Reactions
  • Chemical Reactions
  • Coders
  • Coding
  • Computing System Architectures
  • Data Links
  • Data Rate
  • Decoding
  • Detection
  • Detectors
  • Low Density
  • Modulation
  • Probability
  • Pulse Position Modulation
  • Random Variables
  • Symbols

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Computer Programming and Software Development.
  • Medical Imaging.

Technology Areas

  • Quantum Science - Quantum Key Distribution