Higher-Order Staircase Codes: A Unified Generalization of High-Throughput Coding Techniques

Abstract: We introduce a unified generalization of several well-established high-throughput coding techniques including staircase codes, tiled diagonal zipper codes, continuously interleaved codes, open forward error correction (OFEC) codes, and Robinson-Bernstein convolutional codes as special cases. This generalization which we term "higher-order staircase codes" arises from the marriage of two distinct combinatorial objects: difference triangle sets and finite-geometric nets, which have typically been applied separately to code design. We illustrate one possible realization of these codes, obtaining powerful, high-rate, low-error-floor, and low-complexity coding schemes based on simple iterative syndrome-domain decoding of coupled Hamming component codes. We study some properties of difference triangle sets having minimum scope and sum-of-lengths, which correspond to memory-optimal higher-order staircase codes.