Physical Realizations of Multidimensional Voronoi Constellations in Optical Communication Systems

Abstract:Multidimensional geometric shaping has been shown to outperform uniform quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) in optical communication systems but the complexity of symbol decision and bit mapping can often be significant as dimensionality increases. In this paper, a low-complexity geometric shaping method based on multidimensional lattices is investigated both in experiments and simulations. The modulation formats designed based on this method are called Voronoi constellations (VCs) and we study them in 8, 16, and 32 dimensions. We obtain transmission reach improvements of up to 22 and 70% for VCs compared to 4QAM and 16QAM, respectively, in nonlinear long-haul fiber transmission. Moreover, we compare different physical realizations of multidimensional VCs over wavelengths, polarizations, and time slots in both the Gaussian and nonlinear fiber channels. We demonstrate that different physical realizations perform similarly in the fiber-optic back-to-back channel. However, in long-haul transmission systems, spreading the dimensions over time slots can increase the transmission reach up to 4% compared to wavelengths and polarizations. Furthermore, the mutual information and generalized mutual information are estimated and compared to QAM formats at the same spectral efficiencies

Constellation Shaping in Optical Communication Systems

Exploiting the full-dimensional capacity of coherent optical communication systems is needed to overcome the increasing bandwidth demands of the future Internet. To achieve capacity, both coding and shaping gains are required, and they are, in principle, independent. Therefore it makes sense to study shaping and how it can be achieved in various dimensions and how various shaping schemes affect the whole performance in real systems. This thesis investigates the performance of constellation shaping methods including geometric shaping (GS) and probabilistic shaping (PS) in coherent fiber-optic systems. To study GS, instead of considering machine learning approaches or optimization of irregular constellations in two dimensions, we have explored multidimensional lattice-based constellations. These constellations provide a regular structure with a fast and low-complexity encoding and decoding. In simulations, we show the possibility of transmitting and detecting constellation with a size of more than 10^{28} points which can be done without a look-up table to store the constellation points. Moreover, improved performance in terms of bit error rate, symbol error rate, and transmission reach are demonstrated over the linear additive white Gaussian noise as well as the nonlinear fiber channel compared to QAM formats.Furthermore, we investigate the performance of PS in two separate scenarios, i.e., transmitter impairments and transmission over hybrid systems with on-off keying channels. In both cases, we find that while PS-QAM outperforms the uniform QAM in the linear regime, uniform QAM can achieve better performance at the optimum power in the presence of transmitter or channel nonlinearities

Multidimensional Constellation Shaping for Coherent Optical Communication Systems

To overcome the increasing demands for Internet traffic, exploiting the available degrees of freedom in optical communication systems is necessary. In this thesis, we study how constellation shaping can be achieved in various dimensions and how various shaping schemes affect the whole performance in real systems. This thesis investigates the performance of constellation shaping methods including geometric shaping and probabilistic shaping in coherent fiber-optic systems.To study geometric shaping, we explore multidimensional lattice-based constellations. These constellations provide a regular structure with fast and low-complexity encoding and decoding. We show the possibility of transmitting and detecting constellations with a size of more than 10^{28} points, which can be done without a look-up table to store the constellation points. Moreover, we experimentally realize our proposed multidimensional modulation formats in long-haul optical communication systems.Finally, we investigate the performance of probabilistically shaped quadrature amplitude modulation and compare it with uniform cross quadrature amplitude modulation in the presence of transmitter impairments, and with uniform quadrature amplitude modulation in links where higher-order modulation formats co-propagate with on-off keying wavelength channels

Advanced constellation and demapper schemes for next generation digital terrestrial television broadcasting systems

206 p.Esta tesis presenta un nuevo tipo de constelaciones llamadas no uniformes. Estos esquemas presentan una eficacia de hasta 1,8 dB superior a las utilizadas en los últimos sistemas de comunicaciones de televisión digital terrestre y son extrapolables a cualquier otro sistema de comunicaciones (satélite, móvil, cable¿). Además, este trabajo contribuye al diseño de constelaciones con una nueva metodología que reduce el tiempo de optimización de días/horas (metodologías actuales) a horas/minutos con la misma eficiencia. Todas las constelaciones diseñadas se testean bajo una plataforma creada en esta tesis que simula el estándar de radiodifusión terrestre más avanzado hasta la fecha (ATSC 3.0) bajo condiciones reales de funcionamiento.Por otro lado, para disminuir la latencia de decodificación de estas constelaciones esta tesis propone dos técnicas de detección/demapeo. Una es para constelaciones no uniformes de dos dimensiones la cual disminuye hasta en un 99,7% la complejidad del demapeo sin empeorar el funcionamiento del sistema. La segunda técnica de detección se centra en las constelaciones no uniformes de una dimensión y presenta hasta un 87,5% de reducción de la complejidad del receptor sin pérdidas en el rendimiento.Por último, este trabajo expone un completo estado del arte sobre tipos de constelaciones, modelos de sistema, y diseño/demapeo de constelaciones. Este estudio es el primero realizado en este campo

Multidimensional Optimized Optical Modulation Formats

This chapter overviews the relatively large body of work (experimental and theoretical) on modulation formats for optical coherent links. It first gives basic definitions and performance metrics for modulation formats that are common in the literature. Then, the chapter discusses optimization of modulation formats in coded systems. It distinguishes between three cases, depending on the type of decoder employed, which pose quite different requirements on the choice of modulation format. The three cases are soft-decision decoding, hard-decision decoding, and iterative decoding, which loosely correspond to weak, medium, and strong coding, respectively. The chapter also discusses the realizations of the transmitter and transmission link properties and the receiver algorithms, including DSP and decoding. It further explains how to simply determine the transmitted symbol from the received 4D vector, without resorting to a full search of the Euclidean distances to all points in the whole constellation

Low-Complexity Geometric Shaping

Approaching Shannon's capacity via geometric shaping has usually been regarded as challenging due to modulation and demodulation complexity, requiring look-up tables to store the constellation points and constellation bit labeling. To overcome these challenges, in this paper, we study lattice-based geometrically shaped modulation formats in multidimensional Euclidean space. We describe and evaluate fast and low complexity modulation and demodulation algorithms that make these modulation formats practical, even with extremely high constellation sizes with more than $10^{28}$ points. The uncoded bit error rate performance of these constellations is compared with the conventional QAM formats in the additive white Gaussian noise and nonlinear fiber channels. At a spectral efficiency of 2 bits/sym/polarization, compared with 4-QAM format, transmission reach improvement of more than 38% is shown at the hard-decision forward error correction threshold of $2.26\times 10^{-4}$

Experimental Demonstration of 8-Dimensional Voronoi Constellations with 65,536 and 16,777,216 Symbols

We experimentally demonstrate high-cardinality, low-complexity Voronoi constellations based on the E8 lattice over multiple time slots with OSNR and launch power gains of up to 1.7 and 2.4 dB for back-to-back and 80 km fiber transmission, respectively, compared to QAM formats