LDPC Coded Modulation with Probabilistic Shaping for Optical Fiber Systems

An LDPC coded modulation scheme with probabilistic shaping, optimized interleavers and noniterative demapping is proposed. Full-field simulations show an increase in transmission distance by 8% compared to uniformly distributed input.Comment: 3 pages, 3 figures. Paper is accepted for presentation at OFC 2015. Following the submission to OFC, the blue box in Fig. 1 has been corrected and reference [3] has been update

On Achievable Rates for Long-Haul Fiber-Optic Communications

Lower bounds on mutual information (MI) of long-haul optical fiber systems for hard-decision and soft-decision decoding are studied. Ready-to-use expressions to calculate the MI are presented. Extensive numerical simulations are used to quantify how changes in the optical transmitter, receiver, and channel affect the achievable transmission rates of the system. Special emphasis is put to the use of different quadrature amplitude modulation formats, channel spacings, digital back-propagation schemes and probabilistic shaping. The advantages of using MI over the prevailing $Q$-factor as a figure of merit of coded optical systems are also highlighted.Comment: Hard decision mutual information analysis added, two typos correcte

Impact of 4D channel distribution on the achievable rates in coherent optical communication experiments

We experimentally investigate mutual information and generalized mutual information for coherent optical transmission systems. The impact of the assumed channel distribution on the achievable rate is investigated for distributions in up to four dimensions. Single channel and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission over transmission links with and without inline dispersion compensation are studied. We show that for conventional WDM systems without inline dispersion compensation, a circularly symmetric complex Gaussian distribution is a good approximation of the channel. For other channels, such as with inline dispersion compensation, this is no longer true and gains in the achievable information rate are obtained by considering more sophisticated four-dimensional (4D) distributions. We also show that for nonlinear channels, gains in the achievable information rate can also be achieved by estimating the mean values of the received constellation in four dimensions. The highest gain for such channels is seen for a 4D correlated Gaussian distribution

Sensitivity Gains by Mismatched Probabilistic Shaping for Optical Communication Systems

Probabilistic shaping of quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) is used to enhance the sensitivity of an optical communication system. Sensitivity gains of 0.43 dB and 0.8 dB are demonstrated in back-to-back experiments by shaping of 16QAM and 64QAM, respectively. Further, numerical simulations are used to prove the robustness of probabilistic shaping to a mismatch between the constellation used and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the channel. It is found that, accepting a 0.1 dB SNR penalty, only four shaping distributions are required to support these gains for 64QAM.Comment: Title and introduction were updated and the discussion of Section IV-B was extended. Additionally, some minor modifications were made to the manuscrip

Probabilistic Shaping for Finite Blocklengths: Distribution Matching and Sphere Shaping

In this paper, we provide for the first time a systematic comparison of distribution matching (DM) and sphere shaping (SpSh) algorithms for short blocklength probabilistic amplitude shaping. For asymptotically large blocklengths, constant composition distribution matching (CCDM) is known to generate the target capacity-achieving distribution. As the blocklength decreases, however, the resulting rate loss diminishes the efficiency of CCDM. We claim that for such short blocklengths and over the additive white Gaussian channel (AWGN), the objective of shaping should be reformulated as obtaining the most energy-efficient signal space for a given rate (rather than matching distributions). In light of this interpretation, multiset-partition DM (MPDM), enumerative sphere shaping (ESS) and shell mapping (SM), are reviewed as energy-efficient shaping techniques. Numerical results show that MPDM and SpSh have smaller rate losses than CCDM. SpSh--whose sole objective is to maximize the energy efficiency--is shown to have the minimum rate loss amongst all. We provide simulation results of the end-to-end decoding performance showing that up to 1 dB improvement in power efficiency over uniform signaling can be obtained with MPDM and SpSh at blocklengths around 200. Finally, we present a discussion on the complexity of these algorithms from the perspective of latency, storage and computations.Comment: 18 pages, 10 figure