Increasing the information rates of optical communications via coded modulation: a study of transceiver performance

Optical fibre underpins the global communications infrastructure and has experienced an astonishing evolution over the past four decades, with current commercial systems transmitting data rates in excess of 10 Tb/s over a single fibre core. The continuation of this dramatic growth in throughput has become constrained due to a power dependent nonlinear distortion arising from a phenomenon known as the Kerr effect. The mitigation of fibre nonlinearities is an area of intense research. However, even in the absence of nonlinear distortion, the practical limit on the transmission throughput of a single fibre core is dominated by the finite signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) afforded by current state-of-the-art coherent optical transceivers. Therefore, the key to maximising the number of information bits that can be reliably transmitted over a fibre channel hinges on the simultaneous optimisation of the modulation format and code rate, based on the SNR achieved at the receiver. In this work, we use an information theoretic approach based on the mutual information and the generalised mutual information to characterise a state-of-the-art dual polarisation m-ary quadrature amplitude modulation transceiver and subsequently apply this methodology to a 15-carrier super-channel to achieve the highest throughput (1.125 Tb/s) ever recorded using a single coherent receiver

Hierarchical Distribution Matching for Probabilistically Shaped Coded Modulation

The implementation difficulties of combining distribution matching (DM) and dematching (invDM) for probabilistic shaping (PS) with soft-decision forward error correction (FEC) coding can be relaxed by reverse concatenation, for which the FEC coding and decoding lies inside the shaping algorithms. PS can seemingly achieve performance close to the Shannon limit, although there are practical implementation challenges that need to be carefully addressed. We propose a hierarchical DM (HiDM) scheme, having fully parallelized input/output interfaces and a pipelined architecture that can efficiently perform the DM/invDM without the complex operations of previously proposed methods such as constant composition DM (CCDM). Furthermore, HiDM can operate at a significantly larger post-FEC bit error rate (BER) for the same post-invDM BER performance, which facilitates simulations. These benefits come at the cost of a slightly larger rate loss and required signal-to-noise ratio at a given post-FEC BER.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Performance Prediction of Nonbinary Forward Error Correction in Optical Transmission Experiments

In this paper, we compare different metrics to predict the error rate of optical systems based on nonbinary forward error correction (FEC). It is shown that the correct metric to predict the performance of coded modulation based on nonbinary FEC is the mutual information. The accuracy of the prediction is verified in a detailed example with multiple constellation formats, FEC overheads in both simulations and optical transmission experiments over a recirculating loop. It is shown that the employed FEC codes must be universal if performance prediction based on thresholds is used. A tutorial introduction into the computation of the threshold from optical transmission measurements is also given.Comment: submitted to IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technolog

Constellation Shaping for WDM systems using 256QAM/1024QAM with Probabilistic Optimization

In this paper, probabilistic shaping is numerically and experimentally investigated for increasing the transmission reach of wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical communication system employing quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). An optimized probability mass function (PMF) of the QAM symbols is first found from a modified Blahut-Arimoto algorithm for the optical channel. A turbo coded bit interleaved coded modulation system is then applied, which relies on many-to-one labeling to achieve the desired PMF, thereby achieving shaping gain. Pilot symbols at rate at most 2% are used for synchronization and equalization, making it possible to receive input constellations as large as 1024QAM. The system is evaluated experimentally on a 10 GBaud, 5 channels WDM setup. The maximum system reach is increased w.r.t. standard 1024QAM by 20% at input data rate of 4.65 bits/symbol and up to 75% at 5.46 bits/symbol. It is shown that rate adaptation does not require changing of the modulation format. The performance of the proposed 1024QAM shaped system is validated on all 5 channels of the WDM signal for selected distances and rates. Finally, it was shown via EXIT charts and BER analysis that iterative demapping, while generally beneficial to the system, is not a requirement for achieving the shaping gain.Comment: 10 pages, 12 figures, Journal of Lightwave Technology, 201

Forward Error Correction for High Capacity Transmission Systems

Αυτή η μελέτη διερευνά την αλληλεπίδραση μεταξύ FEC διόρθωσης σφαλμάτων προώθησης και ψηφιακού αντιστάθμιση μη γραμμικότητας DBP σε ένα κανάλι ινών μεγάλων αποστάσεων. Πρώτον, α Η προσέγγιση που βασίζεται στην έρευνα χρησιμοποιείται για τον προσδιορισμό των τεχνολογιών αιχμής στο FEC για το κανάλι ινών και προσαρμόστε τα στο τελικό σχέδιο. Οι σχεδιαστικές επιλογές περιλαμβάνουν το χρήση τετριμμένων bit κωδικοποιημένης διαμόρφωσης αρχιτεκτονικής T-BICM με συνενωμένη σχήμα κώδικα που χρησιμοποιεί έναν επαναληπτικό soft αποκωδικοποιητή. Η απαίτηση για συνενωμένη Η εφαρμογή FEC οδήγησε σε μια άλλη έρευνα για έναν κώδικα καλής απόδοσης συνδυασμός. Το ακανόνιστο LDPC και το οιονεί κυκλικό QC-LDPC, που υιοθετήθηκαν από το DVB-S2 και Τα πρότυπα IEEE 802.11, αντίστοιχα, συνδυάστηκαν με τον κώδικα σκάλας και σύγκριση με βάση τις επιτευχθείσες επιδόσεις. Αποδεικνύουμε ότι αυξάνοντας τις ίνες απόσταση μετάδοσης κατά 1/3, από 300km έως 400km, διατηρώντας παράλληλα την η ίδια απόδοση και η χρήση των ίδιων γενικών εξόδων, δηλαδή 27,5% είναι εφικτό όταν υλοποίηση του DBP με 2 βήματα/περιοχή ή 3 βήματα/περιοχή, ανάλογα με το αν το Οι επαναλήψεις αποκωδικοποίησης είναι 10 ή 5. Αυτή η μελέτη καταλήγει με την εύνοια του LDPC από το DVB-S2 πάνω από το QC-LDPC του IEEE 802.11 για κανάλι ινών μεγάλων αποστάσεων. Το συμπέρασμα βγαίνει με βάση σχετικά με την καλύτερη απόδοση για το LDPC-DVB, λόγω των μεγάλων μηκών κωδικών του και του υποστήριξη για υψηλούς ρυθμούς κωδικοποίησης με αποτέλεσμα χαμηλές γενικές απαιτήσειςThis study investigates the interplay between forward error correction FEC and digital back-propagation DBP nonlinearity compensation on a long-haul fibre channel. First, a research-based approach is used to identify the state-of-the-art technologies in FEC for the fibre channel and adapt them to the final design. The design choices includes the usage of trivial bit interleaved coded modulation T-BICM architecture with a concatenated code scheme that uses an iterative soft decoder. The requirement for a concatenated FEC implementation motivated another investigation of a well-performing code combination. The Irregular LDPC and quasi-cyclic QC-LDPC, adopted from DVB-S2 and IEEE 802.11 standards, respectively, were each concatenated with staircase code and compared based on the attained performance. We prove that increasing the fibre transmission distance by a factor of 1/3, from 300km to 400km, while maintaining the same performance and using the same overhead, i.e. 27.5\% is achievable when implementing DBP with 2 steps/span or 3 steps/span, depending on whether the decoding iterations are 10 or 5. This study concludes with favouring LDPC from DVB-S2 over IEEE 802.11's QC-LDPC for long haul fibre channel. The conclusion is made based on the better attained performance for LDPC-DVB, due to its long code lengths, and its support for high coding rates resulting low overhead requirement