The present invention relates to data communication systems and methods thereof. More specifically, embodiments of the present invention provide a data transmission method. Data are encoded with staircase encoder, and staircase coded blocks are first interleaved then combined into outer code frames. Code frames additionally include sync words and padding bits. A second interleaving is applied to the bits of the code frames, and Hamming encoding is performed on the output of the second interleaver. Hamming codewords are Gray-mapped to dual-polarized quadrature-amplitude-modulation (DP-QAM) symbols, and a third interleaving of the symbols from a set of successive Hamming codewords is performed. Pilot symbols are inserted periodically into the stream of DP-QAM symbols. There are other embodiments as well.