Reducing misframe frequency for HEC-based variable length frame suitable for IP services

The technique of variable frames with HEC (header error control) and frame length information is being studied widely for transporting IP packets efficiently in layer 2. The HEC and frame length information are used for frame alignment. This paper investigates the frame alignment performance and finds that the conventional frame alignment method allows a misframe, the framer declares out-of-sync falsely due to bit error corruption of the header, to occur frequently. We propose a method for reducing the misframe frequency that is based on forced two-bit error correction. We show that the proposed method has a much better performance than the conventional method.