Method for increasing the probability of error correction in an optical communication channel

A method for improving resilience of a communication channel being adapted to transfer data from a transmitter side to a receiver side and having a bandwidth, to correlated errors, said channel is being formed by a time-multiplexed aggregation of a plurality of lower rate constituent virtual lanes (VLs) that are distributed over a plurality of physical layer lanes, said physical layer lanes being divisions of said communication channel, said method comprising:

• a) providing a Forward Error-Correction (FEC) mechanism at the receiver side, for reconstructing codewords from data carried by said physical layer lanes, to said receiver side, said FEC allowing a certain amount of errors to be acceptable in the physical layer lanes;
• b) introducing, at said transmitter side, a specific delay to transmission times of each of said constituent VLs, the delays relative to each other, such that the transmission time of each constituent VL is delayed with respect to the transmission time of its preceding constituent VLs by said specific delay;
• and
• c) distributing said constituent VLs over the physical layer lanes, thereby causing bits that are adjacent in said physical layer lanes to be recognized at the receiver side as originating from different bytes in each constituent VL, thereby distributing, by the FEC, said adjacent bits to different codewords.