Hierarchical Distribution Matching for Probabilistically Shaped Coded Modulation

Abstract: The implementation difficulties of combining distribution matching (DM) and dematching (invDM) for probabilistic shaping (PS) with soft-decision forward error correction (FEC) coding can be relaxed by reverse concatenation, for which the FEC coding and decoding lies inside the shaping algorithms. PS can seemingly achieve performance close to the Shannon limit, although there are practical implementation challenges that need to be carefully addressed. We propose a hierarchical DM (HiDM) scheme, having fully parallelized input/output interfaces and a pipelined architecture that can efficiently perform the DM/invDM without the complex operations of previously proposed methods such as constant composition DM (CCDM). Furthermore, HiDM can operate at a significantly larger post-FEC bit error rate (BER) for the same post-invDM BER performance, which facilitates simulations. These benefits come at the cost of a slightly larger rate loss and required signal-to-noise ratio at a given post-FEC BER.