A Novel Data-Aided Frame Synchronization Method Based on Hough Transform for Optical Communications

In optical communication systems, frame synchronization is essential for subsequent operations, such as error correction and payload extraction. Various methods, so far, have been proposed in the published literature, but the performance is unsatisfactory under high bit error rate (BER) conditions. We present, in this work, a novel data-aided frame synchronization technique for optical packet transmission systems, in which the transmitter sends a sequence of packets with a specific synchronization word periodically inserted, and the receiver blindly recognizes the synchronization word to attain frame synchronization. The proposed algorithm detects the synchronization word based on Hough transform (HT), a classic method for line detection in digital image processing. The core principle of the algorithm is to exploit the periodicity of the frame synchronization word, which appears as black-and-white spaced stripes on a binary image when the frames are all aligned. Simulations are conducted over a 56Gbps optical QPSK transmission system, and the results show that our algorithm is still effective in attaining frame synchronization at a BER of 0.3. A comparison is also made between our algorithm and existed autocorrelation (AC)-based algorithm. The results demonstrate that our algorithm has a better error resilience performance. When the BER is higher than 0.03, our algorithm outperforms an AC-based algorithm significantly.