A neural-network-based approach is presented to efficiently implement digital backpropagation (DBP). For a 32 ×100 km fiber-optic link, the resulting "learned" DBP significantly reduces the complexity compared to conventional DBP implementations.

We consider the weighted belief-propagation (WBP) decoder recently proposed by Nachmani et al. where different weights are introduced for each Tanner graph edge and optimized using machine learning techniques. Our focus is on simple-scaling models that use the same weights across certain edges to reduce the storage and computational burden. The main contribution is to show that simple scaling with few parameters often achieves the same gain as the full parameterization. Moreover, several training improvements for WBP are proposed. For example, it is shown that minimizing average binary cross-entropy is suboptimal in general in terms of bit error rate (BER) and a new "soft-BER" loss is proposed which can lead to better performance. We also investigate parameter adapter networks (PANs) that learn the relation between the signal-to-noise ratio and the WBP parameters. As an example, for the (32, 16) Reed-Muller code with a highly redundant parity-check matrix, training a PAN with soft-BER loss gives near-maximum-likelihood performance assuming simple scaling with only three parameters.

Reed-Muller (RM) codes exhibit good performance under maximum-likelihood (ML) decoding due to their highlysymmetric structure. In this paper, we explore the question of whether the code symmetry of RM codes can also be exploited to achieve near-ML performance in practice. The main idea is to apply iterative decoding to a highly-redundant paritycheck (PC) matrix that contains only the minimum-weight dual codewords as rows. As examples, we consider the peeling decoder for the binary erasure channel, linear-programming and belief propagation (BP) decoding for the binary-input additive white Gaussian noise channel, and bit-flipping and BP decoding for the binary symmetric channel. For short block lengths, it is shown that near-ML performance can indeed be achieved in many cases. We also propose a method to tailor the PC matrix to the received observation by selecting only a small fraction of useful minimum-weight PCs before decoding begins. This allows one to both improve performance and significantly reduce complexity compared to using the full set of minimum-weight PCs.

Machine learning is used to compute achievable information rates (AIRs) for a simplified fiber channel. The approach jointly optimizes the input distribution (constellation shaping) and the auxiliary channel distribution to compute AIRs without explicit channel knowledge in an end-to-end fashion.

Product codes (PCs) protect a two-dimensional array of bits using short component codes. Assuming transmission over the binary symmetric channel, the decoding is commonly performed by iteratively applying bounded-distance decoding to the component codes. For this coding scheme, undetected errors in the component decoding-also known as miscorrectionssignificantly degrade the performance. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative decoding algorithm for PCs which can detect and avoid most miscorrections. The algorithm can also be used to decode many recently proposed classes of generalized PCs such as staircase, braided, and half-product codes. Depending on the component code parameters, our algorithm significantly outperforms the conventional iterative decoding method. As an example, for double-error-correcting Bose-Chaudhuri-Hocquenghem component codes, the net coding gain can be increased by up to 0.4 dB. Moreover, the error floor can be lowered by orders of magnitude, up to the point where the decoder performs virtually identical to a genie-aided decoder that avoids all miscorrections. We also discuss post-processing techniques that can be used to reduce the error floor even further.