We generalize staircase codes and tiled diagonal zipper codes, preserving their key properties while allowing each coded symbol to be protected by arbitrarily many component codewords rather than only two. This generalization which we term “higher-order staircase codes” arises from the marriage of two distinct combinatorial objects: difference triangle sets and finite-geometric nets, which have typically been applied separately to code design. We demonstrate one possible realization of these codes, obtaining powerful, high-rate, low-error-floor, and low-complexity coding schemes based on simple iterative syndrome-domain decoding of coupled Hamming component codes. We anticipate that the proposed codes could improve performance–complexity–latency tradeoffs in high-throughput communications applications, most notably fiber-optic, in which classical staircase codes and zipper codes have been applied. We consider the construction of difference triangle sets having minimum scope and sum-of-lengths, which lead to memory-optimal realizations of higher-order staircase codes. These results also enable memory reductions for early families of convolutional codes constructed from difference triangle sets.

Using a generating function approach, a computationally tractable expression is derived to predict the frame error rate arising at the output of the binary symmetric channel when a number of outer Reed–Solomon codes are concatenated with a number of inner Bose–Ray-Chaudhuri–Hocquenghem codes, thereby obviating the need for time-consuming Monte Carlo simulations. Measuring (a) code performance via the gap to the Shannon limit, (b) decoding complexity via an estimate of the number of operations per decoded bit, and (c) decoding latency by the overall frame length, a code search is performed to determine the Pareto frontier for performance-complexity-latency trade-offs.