Patent ID: 8001445

Claim:
A method for communication, comprising: receiving first and second data frames over first and second communication links, respectively, the first and second data frames containing respective first and second replicas of data, which has been encoded with a Forward Error Correction (FEC) code; decoding the FEC code in the received first and second data frames; computing respective first and second soft quality ranks of the first and second data frames based on the decoded FEC code; selecting one of the first and second replicas of the data based on the first and second soft quality ranks; and outputting the selected one of the first and second replicas of the data, wherein computing the soft quality ranks and selecting the one of the first and second replicas comprise, when at least one of the first and second replicas does not contain errors before decoding of the FEC code, selecting one of the replicas that does not contain errors, and when both the first and the second replicas contain errors before decoding of the FEC code, selecting the one of the first and second replicas that is closer to a valid codeword of the FEC code.