AFF3CT: A Fast Forward Error Correction Toolbox!

AFF3CT is a simulator dedicated to the Forward Error Correction (FEC or channel coding). It is written in C++ and it supports a large range of codes: from the well-spread Turbo codes to the very new Polar codes including the Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes. AFF3CT is a command line program and it simulates communication chains based on a Monte Carlo method.

It is very easy to use, for instance, to estimate the BER/FER decoding performances of the (2048,1723) Polar code from 1.0 to 4.0 dB:

aff3ct -C "POLAR" -K 1723 -N 2048 -m 1.0 -M 4.0

And the output will be:

# ----------------------------------------------------
# ---- A FAST FORWARD ERROR CORRECTION TOOLBOX >> ----
# ----------------------------------------------------
# Parameters :
# [...]
#
# The simulation is running...
# ---------------------||------------------------------------------------------||---------------------
#  Signal Noise Ratio  ||   Bit Error Rate (BER) and Frame Error Rate (FER)    ||  Global throughput
#         (SNR)        ||                                                      ||  and elapsed time
# ---------------------||------------------------------------------------------||---------------------
# ----------|----------||----------|----------|----------|----------|----------||----------|----------
#     Es/N0 |    Eb/N0 ||      FRA |       BE |       FE |      BER |      FER ||  SIM_THR |    ET/RT
#      (dB) |     (dB) ||          |          |          |          |          ||   (Mb/s) | (hhmmss)
# ----------|----------||----------|----------|----------|----------|----------||----------|----------
       0.25 |     1.00 ||      104 |    16425 |      104 | 9.17e-02 | 1.00e+00 ||    4.995 | 00h00'00
       1.25 |     2.00 ||      104 |    12285 |      104 | 6.86e-02 | 1.00e+00 ||   13.678 | 00h00'00
       2.25 |     3.00 ||      147 |     5600 |      102 | 2.21e-02 | 6.94e-01 ||   14.301 | 00h00'00
       3.25 |     4.00 ||     5055 |     2769 |      100 | 3.18e-04 | 1.98e-02 ||   30.382 | 00h00'00
# End of the simulation.

Features

The simulator targets high speed simulations and extensively uses parallel techniques like SIMD, multi-threading and multi-nodes programming models. Below, a list of the features that motivated the creation of the simulator:

1. reproduce state-of-the-art decoding performances,
2. explore various channel code configurations, find new trade-offs,
3. prototype hardware implementation (fixed-point receivers, hardware in the loop tools),
4. reuse tried and tested modules and add yours,
5. alternative to MATLAB, if you seek to reduce simulations time.

Installation

First make sure to have installed a C++11 compiler, CMake and Git. Then install AFF3CT by running:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/aff3ct/aff3ct.git
mkdir aff3ct/build
cd aff3ct/build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE="Release"
make -j4

Contribute

• Source Code: https://github.com/aff3ct/aff3ct
• Contributing guidelines: https://github.com/aff3ct/aff3ct/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.rst

Support

If you are having issues, please let us know. We have an issue tracker at: https://github.com/aff3ct/aff3ct/issues

License

The project is licensed under the MIT license.

External Links

• Official website: https://aff3ct.github.io
• Documentation: https://aff3ct.readthedocs.io