Performance Prediction Recipes for Optical Links

Although forward error-correction (FEC) coding is an essential part of modern fiber-optic communication systems, it impractical to implement and evaluate FEC in transmission experiments simulations. Therefore, desirable accurately predict the end-to-end link performance including from data recorded without FEC. In this tutorial, we provide ready-to-implement "recipes" for such prediction techniques, which apply arbitrary channels require no knowledge information or theory. The appropriate choice recipe depends on properties encoder decoder. covered metrics include bit error rate, symbol achievable asymptotic information, all cases computed using a mismatched receiver. Supplementary software implementations are available.