Performance Prediction of Nonbinary Forward Error Correction in Optical Transmission Experiments

In this paper, we compare different metrics to predict the error rate of optical systems based on nonbinary forward error correction (FEC). It is shown that an accurate metric to predict the performance of coded modulation based on nonbinary FEC is the mutual information. The accuracy of the prediction is verified in a detailed example with multiple constellation formats and FEC overheads, in both...