AFF3CT: A Fast Forward Error Correction Toolbox!

AFF3CT is a simulator and a library 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 new Polar codes including the Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes. AFF3CT can be used as 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 -s 1.0

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.

AFF3CT was first intended to be a simulator but as it developed, the need to reuse sub-parts of the code intensified: the library was born. Below is a list of possible applications for the library:

1. build custom communication chains that are not possible with the simulator,
2. facilitate hardware prototyping,
3. enable various modules to be used in SDR contexts.

If you seek for using AFF3CT as a library, please refer to the dedicated documentation page.

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
• Contributing guidelines

Support

If you are having issues, please let us know on our issue tracker.

License

The project is licensed under the MIT license.

How to cite AFF3CT

We recommend you to cite the SoftwareX journal article: A. Cassagne et al., “AFF3CT: A Fast Forward Error Correction Toolbox!,“ Elsevier SoftwareX, 2019 [Bibtex Entry].

External Links

• Official website
• Documentation