Physical layer impact upon packet errors

We postulate a future for optical networks where data is more susceptible to errors than has been the case to date. This paper builds upon a previous study that highlighted content-dependent error in Gigabit Ethernet. In this paper we explain our previous non-uniformity results in terms of interactions between the coding scheme and observed physical layer characteristics. We also present a tool that is able to detect such non-uniform error characteristics in test and deployed networks.