Linear Support Vector Machines for Error Correction in Optical Data Transmission

Reduction of bit error rates in optical transmission systems is an important task that is difficult to achieve. As speeds increase, the difficulty in reducing bit error rates also increases. Channels have differing characteristics, which may change over time, and any error correction employed must be capable of operating at extremely high speeds. In this paper, a linear support vector machine is used to classify large-scale data sets of simulated optical transmission data in order to demonstrate their effectiveness at reducing bit error rates and their adaptability to the specifics of each channel. For the classification, LIBLINEAR is used, which is related to the popular LIBSVM classifier. It is found that is possible to reduce the error rate on a very noisy channel to about 3 bits in a thousand. This is done by a linear separator that can be built in hardware and can operate at the high speed required of an operationally useful decoder.