An Efficient Software Implementation of a FEC Code
Jean‐Charles Henrion, An Efficient Software · 1997
. Today, Forward Error-Correcting (FEC) codes are mainly implemented in hardware, and many believe that their complexity prohibit their software implementation. This paper presents in detail how the performances of a software implementantion can be significantly improved. Different levels of optimization which are independent of the working environment are presented and discussed. The coding throughput of 100 Mbps on an UltraSparc 1 shows that FEC codes can be easily added to multimedia applications without requiring dedicated hardware support. As a case study, we use FEC codes to protect AAL5-PDUs from cell losses in ATM networks. 1 Introduction Communication systems usually rely on two types of error-correction mechanisms. The ARQ (Automatic Repeat Request) techniques, which require data retransmission, are used in many data applications and protocols. The FEC (Forward Error Correction) techniques rely on redundancy in the transmitted messages to recover errors at the rece...