A burst error tolerant synchronization method in an asynchronous transport system

This paper proposes a burst error tolerant synchronization method in an asynchronous transport system. In this method, the received original cell stream is branched off into several streams and these branched streams are then delayed differently so that the bursty errored periods in the resulting streams rarely coincide. The synchronization pattern is detected using these streams based on N-out-of-M logic. This technique is applicable to cell alignment using empty cells with synchronization pattern, as well as to frame alignment. The analyses include synchronization pattern detection probability, alignment recovery time, and misalignment probability performance. This method has the following advantages. (1) It yields a highly tolerant performance against long burst errors because processing with signals at different time positions is introduced. (2) Degradation caused by burst errors is reduced regardless of the synchronization pattern insertion probability. (3) Alignment performance is considerably improved even for a simplified configuration with a majority-logic synchronization pattern detection for only three branched streams.