Tobias A. Eriksson

Approaching Nyquist Limit in WDM Systems by Low-Complexity Receiver-Side Duobinary Shaping

A novel low-complexity coherent receiver solution is presented to improve spectral efficiency in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) systems. It is based on the receiver-side partial-response equalization and maximum-likelihood sequence detection (MLSD) in prefiltered WDM systems. The partial-response equalization shapes the channel into an intermediate state with a known partial response which is finally recovered by MLSD without the need of channel estimation. In this scheme, the severe intersymbol interference induced by the prefiltering can be shared between the partial-response equalization and MLSD. Therefore, a tradeoff can be made between complexity and performance. The feasibility of receiver-side partial-response shaping relaxes the efforts and requirements on the transmitter-side prefiltering, which permits the mature WDM components to implement prefiltering. In addition, the partial-response equalization or shaping structure is also improved based on our prior art, which further simplifies the overall scheme. For near-baudrate-spacing optically prefiltered WDM systems, duobinary response is experimentally proved as a good intermediate response to shape. Due to the short memory of the duobinary response, the complexity of the receiver based on duobinary shaping has been reduced to a low level. As a whole, the proposed scheme provides a good alternative to Nyquist-WDM at comparable spectral efficiencies. With the proposed receiver-side duobinary shaping technique, three sets of experiments have been carried out to verify the improved duobinary shaping scheme and meanwhile demonstrate the main features, including 5 ×112-Gb/s polarization-multiplexed quadrature phase-shift keying (PM-QPSK) WDM transmission over a 25-GHz grid, single-channel 40-Gbaud PM-QPSK experiment, and 30-GHz-spaced 3 × 224-Gb/s PM 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation transmission.

Phase-Sensitive Amplified Transmission Links for Improved Sensitivity and Nonlinearity Tolerance

In this paper, we investigate the properties of transmission links amplified by phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs). Using an analytic description, we explain the principles enabling improved sensitivity compared to conventional links amplified by phase-insensitive amplifiers (PIAs) and mitigation of nonlinear transmission distortions. We demonstrate these features using numerical simulations, and in particular, we show the possibility of efficiently mitigating both self-phase modulation (SPM)-induced distortions and nonlinear phase noise (NLPN) if the link dispersion map is optimized. The properties of the noise on signal and idler are important and to enable NLPN mitigation, the noise must be correlated at the link input. We investigate the role of the dispersion map in detail and show that in a link with standard single mode fiber (SSMF) the optimum dispersion map for efficient nonlinearity mitigation corresponds to precompensation of an amount equal to the effective loss length. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate both improved sensitivity and mitigation of nonlinearities in a 105 km PSA-amplified link transmitting 10 GBd 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) data. We measure a combined effect allowing for more than 12 dB larger span loss in a PSA-amplified link compared to a conventional PIA-amplified link to reach the same bit error ratio (BER) of 1×10-3.

Impact of Intercore Crosstalk on the Transmission Distance of QAM Formats in Multicore Fibers

We investigate the impact of intercore crosstalk on the achievable transmission distance of three square quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats. We show that increasing intercore crosstalk across an 18 dB range starting from -43.4 dB/100 km reduces the achievable transmission distance for all formats, with a greater impact on higher order modulation formats. For a crosstalk level arising from equal signal launch power in each core of a homogeneous 7-core fiber, we measure a reduced transmission distance at BER 1/4 1.5 × 10-2 of 24%, 38% and 54%, for polarization-division-multiplexed-quadrature phase-shift keying (PDM-QPSK), PDM-16QAM, and PDM-64QAM, respectively. Finally, we investigate the potential impact that dynamic crosstalk variation could have in transmission systems based on multicore fiber and estimate the achievable reach for an outage probability of 1 × 10-5 in the presence of dynamically varying intercore crosstalk.

Comparison of 128-SP-QAM and PM-16QAM in long-haul WDM transmission

We investigate 128-level set-partitioning quadrature amplitude modulation (128-SP-QAM) experimentally and compare the performance to polarization-multiplexed 16QAM both at the same bit rate and at the same symbol rate. Using a recirculating loop we study both single channel and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmission and demonstrate a reach of up to 2680 km at a bit-error rate of 10(-3) for 128-SP-QAM. We confirm that 128-SP-QAM has an increased sensitivity compared to PM-16QAM and show that the maximum transmission distance can be increased by more than 50 % at the same bit rate for both single channel and WDM transmission. We also investigate the performance at the same symbol rate as a possible fall back solution in a degrading link.

Biorthogonal modulation in 8 dimensions experimentally implemented as 2PPM-PS-QPSK

We experimentally demonstrate biorthogonal modulation in 8 dimensions as binary pulse-position modulation polarization-switched QPSK. We compare this format with PM-QPSK at the same bit rate and show a 1.4 dB sensitivity gain and 84 % increased transmission distance.

Influence of fiber-Bragg grating-induced group-delay ripple in high-speed transmission systems

The implementation of a chirped fiber-Bragg grating (FBG) for dispersion compensation in high-speed (up to 120 Gbit/s) transmission systems with differential and coherent detection is, for the first time, experimentally investigated. For systems with differential detection, we examine the influence of group-delay ripple (GDR) in 40 GBd 2-, 4-, and 8-ary differential phase shift keying (DPSK) systems. Furthermore, we conduct a nonlinear-tolerance comparison between the systems implementing dispersion-compensating fibers and FBG modules, using a 5×80 Gbit/s 100-GHz-spaced wavelength division multiplexing 4-ary DPSK signal. The results show that the FBG-based system provides a 2 dB higher optimal launch power, which leads to more than 3 dB optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) improvement at the receiver. For systems with coherent detection, we evaluate the influence of GDR in a 112 Gbit/s dual-polarization quadrature phase shift keying system with respect to signal wavelength. In addition, we demonstrate that, at the optimal launch power, the 112 Gbit/s systems implementing FBG modules and that using electronic dispersion compensation provide similar performance after 840 km transmission despite the fact that the FBG-based system delivers lower OSNR at the receiver. Lastly, we quantify the GDR mitigation capability of a digital linear equalizer in the 112 Gbit/s coherent systems with respect to the equalizer tap number (Ntap). The results indicate that at least Ntap = 9 is required to confine Q-factor variation within 1 dB.

On the impact of carrier phase estimation on phase correlations in coherent fiber transmission

Carrier phase estimation (CPE) is an integral part of the digital signal processing (DSP) of coherent optical communication systems as it compensates laser phase noise (LPN) introduced by free-running transmitter and local oscillating (LO) lasers. Nonlinear interactions during propagation are another source of correlated phase noise. In this paper, we show through simulations and in experiments that blind decision-directed (DD) CPE with regular block lengths removes a large portion of the memory. This makes it virtually impossible in practice to quantify correlations that come from propagation effects, or to obtain rate gains by exploiting the nonlinear phase noise (NLPN). Larger CPE block lengths leave the memory partly intact. This, however, comes at the expense of reduced information rates. We are able to fully recover this rate loss in simulations by using idealized processing of phase distortions. In experiments with full DSP, an almost full rate recovery is reported.

Improved achievable information rates by optimized four-dimensional demappers in optical transmission experiments

We experimentally study different four-dimensional demappers in a dispersion-managed fiber system. The proposed blind algorithm is shown to offer gains of 0.2 bits per 4D symbol for DP-16QAM.

Four-dimensional estimates of mutual information in coherent optical communication experiments

Mutual information is experimentally investigated for long-haul coherent transmission. Receivers that consider memoryless four-dimensional noise distributions can achieve significantly higher rates than receivers assuming two-dimensional symmetric distributions.

Single parity check multi-core modulation for power efficient spatial super-channels

We investigate multi-core modulation formats for spatial super-channels using a single parity check on PDM-QPSK symbols. Compared to per-core PDM-QPSK, we show improvements in required OSNR of up to 1.8 dB, with minimal impact on spectral efficiency.