A Comparison between RS+TCM and LDPC FEC schemes for the G.fast standard

Abstract

The need for increasing internet connection speeds motivated the creation of a new standard, G.fast, for digital subscriber lines (DSL), in order to provide fiber-like performance using short twisted pair copper wires. This dissertation focuses in the two former candidate codes for the forward error correction (FEC) scheme, namely Reed-Solomon (RS) with trellis-coded modulation (TCM), from previous DSL standards, and low density parity check (LDPC) codes, from the G.hn standard for home networking. The main objective is to compare both schemes, in order to evaluate which of them performs better, considering metrics such as error correction performance and computational cost. Even though the selected code for G.fast was RS with TCM, it is believed that this choice was biased, as a more recent iterative code like LDPC is known to have a better error correction performance.