arXiv:1704.01893v4 [cs.IT] 3 Dec 2018 Noname manuscript No. (will be inserted by the editor) Improved Decoding and Error Floor Analysis of Staircase Codes Lukas Holzbaur · Hannes Bartz · Antonia Wachter-Zeh Received: date / Accepted: date Abstract Staircase codes play an important role as error-correcting codes in optical com- munications. In this paper, a low-complexity method for resolving stall patterns when de- coding staircase codes is described. Stall patterns are the dominating contributor to the error floor in the original decoding method. Our improvement is based on locating stall patterns by intersecting non-zero syndromes and flipping the corresponding bits. The approach ef- fectively lowers the error floor and allows for a new range of block sizes to be considered for optical communications at a certain code rate or, alternatively, a significantly decreased error floor for the same block size. Further, an improved error floor analysis is introduced which provides a more accurate estimation of the contributions to the error floor. Keywords Staircase codes · Coding · Error Floor · FEC for optical communications Mathematics Subject Classification (2000) 94B05 · 94B35 L. Holzbaur’s and A. Wachter-Zeh’s work was supported by the Technical University of Munich–Institute for Advanced Study, funded by the German Excellence Initiative and European Union Seventh Framework Pro- gramme under Grant Agreement No. 291763 and the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungs- gemeinschaft, DFG) unter Grant No. WA3907/1-1. Lukas Holzbaur · Antonia Wachter-Zeh Technical University of Munich Institute for Communications Engineering Theresienstr. 90 80333 Munich Tel.: +49-89-289 {29052, 23495} E-mail: {lukas.holzbaur, antonia.wachter-zeh}@tum.de Hannes Bartz German Aerospace Center Institute of Communications and Navigation Satellite Networks M¨ unchner Straße 20 82234 Oberpfaffenhofen-Wessling Tel.: +49-8153-282252 Fax:+49-8153-282844 E-mail: hannes.bartz@dlr.de