High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing for high-speed transmission systems

CHAPTER 9

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing for high-speed transmission systems Tianhua Xu1,2, Gabriele Liga3 and Polina Bayvel2 1

School of Engineering, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom Optical Networks Group, University College London, London, United Kingdom Signal Processing Systems Group, Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands 2 3

9.1 Fiber nonlinearity in optical communication systems with higher order modulation formats 9.1.1 Introduction to optical fiber nonlinearity Over the past four decades, data rates in optical communications systems have seen a dramatic increase. Currently, over 95% of the digital data traffic is carried over optical fiber networks, which form a substantial part of the national and international communication infrastructure. The development of a series of new technologies contributed to this increase. These include techniques such as wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), advanced modulation formats, optical amplifiers and novel fibers, and coherent detection [1
3]. These developments promoted the revolution of optical communication systems and the growth of the Internet toward the direction of high-capacity and long-distance transmissions. The performance of long-haul high-capacity optical fiber communication systems is significantly degraded by transmission impairments, such as chromatic dispersion (CD), polarization mode dispersion (PMD), laser phase noise, and Kerr fiber nonlinearities [4,5]. With the ability to capture of the amplitude and the phase of the signals using coherent optical detection, the powerful compensation and effective mitigation of the transmission impairments can be implemented using the digital signal processing (DSP) in the electrical domain. This has become one of the most promising techniques for next-generation optical communication networks to achieve a performance close to the Shannon capacity limit. DSP combined with coherent detection is a very promising solution for long-haul, high-capacity optical fiber communication systems, offering great flexibility in the design, deployment, and operation of optical communication networks. Optical Fiber Telecommunications V11 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-816502-7.00010-5

Copyright r 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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CD can be compensated using the digital filters in both the time domain and the frequency domain [6,7]. PMD can be equalized adaptively using the leastmean-square method [8], the constant modulus algorithm (CMA), and other approaches [9]. Phase noise from laser sources can also be estimated and compensated using the feed-forward and the feedback carrier phase estimation (CPE) approaches [10,11]. However, the achievable capacity of optical communication systems is limited by the nonlinear distortions inherent to transmission using optical fibers, such as self-phase modulation (SPM), cross-phase modulation (XPM) and four-wave mixing (FWM). These signal degradations are more significant in systems using larger transmission bandwidths (BWs), closer channel spacing, and higher order modulation formats. Optical fiber nonlinearities are the major bottleneck to optical fiber transmission performance [3,12,13]. This chapter focuses on the introduction and investigation of DSP employed for fiber nonlinear impairments compensation based on the coherent detection of optical signals, to provide a roadmap for the design and implementation of real-time optical fiber communication systems. The optical fiber channel is fundamentally nonlinear, which means that the refractive index of the propagation medium neff changes in response to the strength of the square of the electric field E(t, z) [4], neff 5 n0 1 n2 jEðt; zÞj2

ð9:1Þ

where n0 and n2 are the linear and nonlinear refractive indices of the fiber, respectively. For silica, n0  1.5 and n2  3 3 10220 m2/W. For Eq. (9.1), note that the value of |E(t, z)| has been normalized, such that |E(t, z)|2 is equal to the optical power I. After a transmission distance of L, the nonlinear optical Kerr effect will result in a phase shift, which, when added to the shift from linear propagation, leads to a total phase shift, given by φ 5 k0 n0 L 1 φNL

ð9:2Þ

where k0 5 2π/λ0 is the free-space wave number, λ0 is the optical wavelength, and ðz φNL ðt; zÞ 5 jγ jEðt; z0 Þj2 dz0 5 jγjEðt; 0Þj2 Leff ð9:3Þ 0 2αz

and Leff 91 2αe is the so-called effective length. The fiber nonlinear coefficient γ, a measure of nonlinearity, is described by γ5 where Aeff is the effective area of the fiber.

k0 n2 Aeff

ð9:4Þ

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

Transmission of more data within a finite BW requires greater optical power levels |E(t, z)|2, which in turn leads to the power-dependent nonlinear distortion of the transmitted data. This imposes a Kerr nonlinearity limit, sometimes referred to as the nonlinear Shannon limit. Strictly speaking, this limit is only a lower bound to the channel capacity, as it assumes that nonlinear interference (NLI) is noise (whereas, as shown above, it is deterministic). The propagation of signals through an optical fiber is described by the well-known nonlinear Schrödinger equation [4] given, in the single polarization case, by @Eðt; zÞ β @2 Eðt; zÞ α 2 Eðt; zÞ 1 jγjEðt; zÞj2 Eðt; zÞ 52j 2 @z 2 2 @2 t

ð9:5Þ

where E(t, z) is the optical field as a function of time t and distance z, and β 2, α, and γ are the dispersion, the attenuation, and the nonlinearity coefficient of the fiber, respectively. In the general dual-polarization case, Eq. (9.5) can be generalized to the Manakov equation [14,15]: @Eðt; zÞ β @2 Eðt; zÞ α 8 52j 2 2 Eðt; zÞ 1 j γjjEðt; zÞjj2 Eðt; zÞ 2 @z 2 9 2 @t

ð9:6Þ

where E(t, z) denotes the dual-polarization optical field vector. The effects of propagation through an optical fiber on an optical signal can be understood by breaking Eq. (9.5) into two different equations obtained by setting β 2 and γ to zero, in turn. For γ 5 0 Eq. (9.6) becomes, for each polarization of the optical field, @Eðt; zÞ β @2 Eðt; zÞ α 52j 2 2 Eðt; zÞ @z 2 2 @2 t

ð9:7Þ

which can be easily solved in closed form in the frequency domain and whose solution is given by  α  ð9:8Þ Eðω; zÞ 5 Eðω; 0Þ 3 exp 2 z 2 Eq. (9.8) physically corresponds to a spreading of the optical pulse in the time domain which is quadratically dependent on its optical BW. On the other hand, when β 2 5 0 but γ6¼0 we have @Eðt; zÞ 8 α 5 2 j γjEðt; zÞj2 Eðt; zÞ 2 Eðt; zÞ @z 9 2

ð9:9Þ

whose solution in the time domain is given by Eðt; zÞ 5 Eðt; 0Þ exp ðjφNL ðt; zÞÞ

ð9:10Þ

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The combination of the above-described effects produces nonlinear distortion or interference [4], which become more significant as the intensity of the optical field increases. Known as the nonlinear Kerr effect, it is the main theoretical bottleneck to reliable transmission of data in optical fiber systems, especially in the presence of amplifier noise where mixing of nonlinear distortion and noise occurs. The nonlinear term in Eq. (9.5) is responsible for the so-called Kerr effect [4]. High data rate optical transmission uses WDM channels; that is, parallel data streams are carried by different wavelengths, spaced apart by a given frequency spacing to avoid channel crosstalk [16,17]. Thus, traditionally, it has been of great interest to classify the effects of the Kerr term in Eq. (9.5) based on which channels are involved in the generation of such effects. A first broad categorization can be made by separating nonlinear effects based on whether or not channels other than the one of interest are involved in their generation. We therefore refer to either interchannel nonlinearity and intrachannel nonlinearity. Furthermore, different types of nonlinear interactions (still within the scope of the Kerr effect) are possible when two or more channels copropagate in a nonlinear optical fiber. In order to identify these different effects, let us assume that the transmitted electrical field is given by Eðt; zÞ 5 E0 ðt; zÞ 1 E1 ðt; zÞ 1 E2 ðt; zÞ

ð9:11Þ

where E0, E1, and E2 are the (scalar) complex envelopes of the transmitted channels at three different wavelengths and E0 is assumed to be the channel of interest. Replacing Eq. (9.11) into Eq. (9.5) we find @ðE0 1 E1 1 E2 Þ β @2 ðE0 1 E1 1 E2 Þ 1 jγjE0 1 E1 1 E2 j2 ðE0 1 E1 1 E2 Þ 52j 2 @z @t 2 2 ð9:12Þ where the attenuation term has been dropped for simplicity of notation. A standard approach consists of assuming a small nonlinearity (perturbative approach) [4], hence Eq. (9.12) can be rewritten as a set of three differential equations. The equation relative to the channel of interest reads as @E0 β @ 2 E0 5 2 j 2 2 1 jγjE0 j2 E0 1 2jγðjE1 j2 1 jE2 j2 ÞE0 1 jγE12 E2 @z 2 @t

ð9:13Þ

As shown in Eq. (9.13), the original nonlinear phase shift acting on the channel of interest is split into three components: (1) a term dependent only on the power of the channel of interest itself, hence called SPM; (2) a term dependent only on the power of the interfering channels called XPM; and (3) a term dependent on a cross-product

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

between the two interfering channels called FWM. The derivation above can be repeated for three or more channels. However, the arising terms are similar to the ones in Eq. (9.13). The only difference consists of the XPM term adding up multiple channels, and additional pairwise FWM cross-products arising with more channels. While both SPM and XPM depend on the power of the channels, the FWM effect is dependent on the actual optical field. Due to this feature, the phase relationship between the copropagating channels is crucial for the accumulation of the FWM. The derivation above can be repeated on a frequency component basis, that is, assuming the propagating field is composed of four continuous-wave (CW) components at frequencies f, f1, f2, and f3. The CW optical fields at frequency f1, f2, and f3 interact with each other to form a new wave at frequency f. The phenomenon is possible whenever the relationship between the four frequencies is [4] f 5 f1 1 f2 2 f3

ð9:14Þ

Defining E(z) 5 E(f, z) and Ej(z) 5 Ej(f, z) and solving Eq. (9.13) in the Fourier domain for the field component at frequency f, it can be shown that [5] EðzÞ 5 jd

 2 α  1 2 exp ðjΔβz 2 αzÞ ð2πÞ2 f  E1 E2 E3 exp z nc 2 α 2 jΔβ

ð9:15Þ

where c is the speed of light, d is a degeneracy coefficient either equal to 3 for f1 5 f26¼f3 or to 6 for f16¼f26¼f3, n is the refractive index (as a function of the frequency f), and Δβ 5 βðf1 Þ 1 βðf2 Þ 2 βðf3 Þ 2 βðf Þ

ð9:16Þ

From Eq. (9.15) it can be observed that the amplitude of the FWM strongly depends on Δβ. For Δβ , , 1, the rightmost fraction in Eq. (9.15) significantly increases in magnitude and, as a result, the FWM product is amplified. The condition where Δβ is close to zero is commonly referred to as phase matching condition, and it is typically met in systems where the dispersion parameter is low. As a result, in scenarios where transmission is performed far from the zero-dispersion point and standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) is used, FWM can be considered as a minor nonlinear effect compared to SPM and XPM. In Section 9.1.2, the performance of receivers compensating for intrachannel nonlinearity (SPM) is analyzed, as well as compensation of interchannel nonlinearity, including both XPM and FWM.

9.1.2 Nonlinear distortions and modulation dependency Considering the contributions from amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise and fiber nonlinearities (optical Kerr effect), the performance of a dispersion-unmanaged optical communication system can be described using a

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so-called effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) [14,15], which after fiber propagation can be described as SNR 5

P P 5 2 2 σeff σASE 1 σ2S-S 1 σ2S-N

ð9:17Þ

where P is the average optical power per channel, σ2ASE represents the total power of ASE noise within the examined channel due to the optical amplification process, σ2S-S represents the distortions due to signal
signal nonlinear interactions, and σ2S-N represents the distortions from signal
ASE noise interactions. For dual-polarization multispan Erbium-doped optical fiber amplifier (EDFA) amplified Nyquist-spaced WDM transmission systems, the Gaussian ASE noise from EDFAs at the end of each transmission span can be expressed as [1] σ2ASE 5 Nspans ðG 2 1ÞUFn Uhv0 RS

ð9:18Þ

where Ns is the total number of spans in the link, G is the EDFA gain, Fn is the EDFA noise figure, hν 0 is the average photon energy at the optical carrier frequency ν 0, and RS denotes the symbol rate of the transmitted signal. The contribution of the nonlinear distortions due to nonlinear signal
signal interaction can be described as follows [18
20]: σ2S-S 5 NsE11 ηP 3

ð9:19Þ

where η is the nonlinear distortion coefficient and E is the coherence factor, which is responsible for the increasing signal
signal interaction with transmission distance. This factor lies between 0 and 1 depending on the decorrelation of the nonlinear distortions between each fiber span [18]. In contrast to the σ2S-S term, the corresponding noise contribution due to signal
ASE interaction grows quadratically with launched power [21,22] and can be modeled as σ2S-N 5 3ζησ2ASE P 2

ð9:20Þ

with the distance dependent prefactor of ζ, which accounts for the accumulation of signal
ASE distortions with the transmission distance, and can be effectively truncated as [23] ζ5

Ns X k51

k11ES-N 

NsE11 N E12 1 s 2 E12

ð9:21Þ

In the framework of the first-order perturbation theory, the coefficient η can be defined depending on the model assumptions. In conventional approaches, the impact of optical fiber nonlinearities on signal propagation is typically treated as additive

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

circularly symmetric Gaussian noise (GN) [18,19,24]. In particular, the effective variance of nonlinear distortions is clearly supposed to be entirely independent of the signal modulation format. However, it has been theoretically shown that the nonlinear distortions depend on the channel input symbols, and the Gaussian assumption of optical nonlinear distortions cannot therefore be sufficiently accurate [25
31]. Furthermore, significant discrepancies have been recently observed, especially for loworder signal modulation formats [27
30]. Assuming that all WDM channels are equally spaced, the modulation format dependent nonlinear distortion coefficient η over a single fiber span can be expressed in closed form using the approximation [32]     2 80 κγ 2 Leff Nch 1 1 ηðNch Þ  η0 ðNch Þ 2 Ψ 1 C 1 1 ð9:22Þ 81 πjβ 2 j Ls RS2 2 where β 2 is the group velocity dispersion coefficient, γ is the fiber nonlinear coefficient, Leff is the effective fiber span length, Ls is the fiber span length, Nch is the total number of WDM channels, Ψ(x) is the digamma function, C  0.577 is the Euler
Mascheroni constant. The constant κ is related to the fourth standardized moment (kurtosis) of the input signal constellation. For Gaussian, quadrature phase shift keyed (QPSK) (4QAM), 16QAM, 64QAM, and 256QAM, its values are 0, 1, 17/25, 13/21, 121/200, respectively [30,32]. Finally, the coefficient η0 quantifies the influence of optical fiber nonlinearity per fiber span under the Gaussian assumption, and can be analytically approximated as [18
20], where α is the fiber attenuation parameter.  2   3 2 2 αγ2 Leff π 2 2 arsinh jL N R ð9:23Þ ηðNch Þ  jβ s ch S 2 2 3 πjβ 2 jRS2 Parameters used in the analytical model are specified in Table 9.1. The SNR performance of transmission systems considering signal-signal interactions (using dispersion compensation only) for different modulation formats is shown in Fig. 9.1. The effectiveness of the modulation-dependent analytical model for predicting the performance of electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) and multichannel backpropagation (MC-DBP) has been verified in previous work [30,31,33
35], where detailed comparisons between the analytical and simulation results in terms of SNR have been investigated under various transmission schemes.

9.2 Digital schemes for fiber nonlinearity compensation 9.2.1 Principle of digital backpropagation One way to improve the transmission quality is carry out mitigation of the above effects at the receiver, that is, after the optical field E(t, z) is detected. If, to a first approximation, we assume that the received signal is noise-free, the distortion

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Table 9.1 Parameters in model of fiber nonlinearities considering modulation formats. Parameter

Value

Symbol rate Channel spacing Central wavelength Number of channels Roll-off Attenuation coefficient (α) Chromatic dispersion (CD) coefficient (D) Nonlinear coefficient (γ) Span length Erbium-doped optical fiber amplifier (EDFA) noise figure Planck constant (h) Euler
Mascheroni constant (C)

32 GBd 32 GHz 1550 nm 9 0 0.2 dB/km 17 ps/nm/km 1.2/(W.km) 80 km 4.5 dB 6.626 3 10234 J s 0.577

16.5 Signal-to-noise ratio (dB)

378

16

DP-4QAM DP-16QAM DP-64QAM DP-256QAM

15.5 15 14.5 14 13.5 −5

−4

−3

−2

−1

0

1

Optical power per channel (dBm)

Figure 9.1 Performance of optical communication systems with different modulation format considering fiber nonlinearities.

generated by Eq. (9.6) is deterministic and can be fully predicted. As a result, it can also be, in principle, fully compensated. The effect of Eq. (9.6) can be reversed by integrating it with a reversed sign of z, which is equivalent to solve such equation with reversed sign parameters: α- 2 α

ð9:24Þ

β2- 2 β2

ð9:25Þ

γ- 2 γ

ð9:26Þ

Therefore, when coherent detection is used, the transmitted signal at the beginning of the fiber can be reconstructed by using the detected signal E(t, L) as initial value of

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

Eq. (9.6) and using DSP at the receiver to integrate it numerically, hence obtaining the optical field at the initial section of the fiber E(t, 0). Such integration effectively digitally reverses the forward propagation of the optical fiber and for this reason it is commonly referred to as digital backpropagation (DBP) [36
40]. The numerical implementation of DBP is based on the split-step Fourier (SSF) algorithm [4]—the most widespread approach to solving Eq. (9.6). Eq. (9.6) can be rewritten as @Eðt; zÞ  ^ ^ E ðt; zÞ 5 D1N @z

ð9:27Þ

^ and N ^ are respectively a linear and nonlinear operator defined as where D ^ 5 2 j β2 @ 2 α D 2 2 @2 t

ð9:28Þ

^ 5 j 8 γjj Eðt; zÞjj2 N 9

ð9:29Þ

^ contains the dispersion and attenuation effects, whereas the nonThe linear operator D ^ linear operator N causes the nonlinear effects. The SSF method is based on breaking the integral solution into dz pieces small enough such that the solution can be approximated by

 ^ 1 NÞdz ^ ^ ^ Eðt; z 1 dzÞ 5 exp ðD Eðt; zÞ  exp ðDdzÞ exp ðNdzÞEðt; zÞ ð9:30Þ that is, the effect of the sum of the two operators can be thought of as the composition of each of the two acting alone. In the limit of dz tending to zero, Eq. (9.30) converges to the solution of Eq. (9.6) [41]. Therefore, in order to obtain the wanted solution, one can iteratively find the solution for one operator and then for the other, covering the required integration length by small steps dz. The solution given by the ^ can be conveniently represented in the frequency domain as operator D   β 2 2 ^ exp ðDdzÞ 5 exp j ω dz ð9:31Þ 2 where it can be efficiently implemented using a fast Fourier transform (FFT) and ^ is easily implemultiplication blocks. Instead, the solution given by the operator N mented as (complex) multiplication in the time domain. As a result, as shown in Fig. 9.2, the SSF fundamental step consists of an FFT to pass the signal in the frequency domain, a multiplication block, an inverse FFT to switch back into the time ^ domain, and a multiplication block to implement expðNdzÞ. However, in a real DBP implementation, due to complexity constraints, the number of steps for given link length L needs to be reduced as much as possible,

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× Nsteps

exp Dˆ (ω)dz]

]

FFT

FFT –1

exp Nˆ (t)dz ]

]

380

Figure 9.2 Schematic diagram of the split-step Fourier (SSF) algorithm.

resulting in a certain degree of inaccuracy in the calculation of the SSF step dz. This has been shown to significantly reduce the performance of DBP especially as the optical field BW increases [38,39,42]. Large DBP BWs are to be considered when two or more WDM channels are backpropagated together in order to compensate jointly for intrachannel (SPM) and interchannel (XPM and FWM). Modified versions of the basic algorithm discussed above have been shown in Refs. [43
46] with the aim of decreasing the number of steps required to maintain a given backpropagation accuracy. As mentioned where precisely, the ideal linearization of the fiber channel through DBP is fundamentally limited by the nonlinear interaction or mixing between signal and ASE noise as well as PMD. The detected optical field is then a combination of signal and ASE which arises from the optical amplification along the fiber link. In an EDFA-amplified fiber system an amplifier is typically placed at the link of each fiber span. As a result, when DBP is applied, both signal and noise are backpropagated. While the signal
signal nonlinear effects within the DBP BW are fully compensated, the signal
ASE cannot be due to the way noise is added across the link. This residual term affects and ultimately limits the performance of system employing DBP at high transmitted powers. PMD has been shown to be an additional major bottleneck to the performance of systems employing DBP [42,47]. The optical field experiences random rotations of the polarization state as it propagates through the optical fiber due to its birefringence [14,15]. The average effect of the interaction between these rotations and nonlinear fiber effects is already accounted for in Eq. (9.6). However, PMD results in random differential group delays (DGDs) accumulating over the fiber length between the two polarization states of the propagating optical signal. This effectively results in different frequency components with a polarization state drifting apart as the signal propagates. Due to the stochastic nature of PMD, DBP can only reverse the signal propagation in the fiber assuming that the polarization states are not moving relatively to each other. This effectively results in a residual uncompensated NLI term which is more significant as the expected value of the DGD of the fiber link increases [42,47].

9.2.2 Achievable digital backpropagation gain Nonlinear distortions can be modeled as additive noise. Therefore, the effective SNR at the sampled output of a matched filter (MF) can be defined as

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

SNR 5

P σ2ASE

1 σ2S-S 1 σ2S-N

ð9:32Þ

where P is the transmitted signal power, σ2ASE is the overall ASE noise power accumulated along the link, σ2S-S is the signal
signal NLI power, and σ2S-N is the signal-noise NLI power. All these noise components are to be considered integrated over the MF BW. The overall ASE noise is the contribution of multiple additive and uncorrelated components coming from each EDFA at the end of the fiber span; then 2 σ2ASE 5 Nspans PASE

ð9:33Þ

PASE 5 GUNFUhvB

ð9:34Þ

and [1]

where G is the amplifier gain, NF its noise figure, hν the photon energy, and B the signal optical BW. This quantity remains fixed once the span losses, the amplifiers, and the link length are chosen. In addition to the system parameters, the NLI terms are also dependent on the transmitted power. According to any first-order perturbative approximation, the two terms σ2S-S and σ2S-N can be expressed as [20,21,25,27,48,49] ð11ES-S Þ σ2S-S 5 ηS-S P 3 Nspans

ð9:35Þ

σ2S-N 5 ηS-N ζPASE P 2

ð9:36Þ

where ζ5

N spans X

k11ES-N

ð9:37Þ

k51 ð21ESN Þ is a coefficient asymptotically growing as Nspans Depending on the specific model within the first-order perturbative framework, the values of ηS-S, ηS-N, ES-S, and ES-N can change significantly. The GN model [20,48], for instance, considers nonlinear coefficients η that are modulation format independent (due to the initial assumption of Gaussianity of the propagating signal). This approach has been shown not to be strictly correct ([25,27,50]), and significant inaccuracies have been demonstrated for low-order modulation formats [27
29]. However, as shown in Ref. [49], the values of the signal
signal parameters (η and E) are typically close to their signal-noise counterparts. As a result, to a first (but accurate!) approximation, it can be assumed that

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ηS-S  ηS-N 5 η

ð9:38Þ

ES-S  ES-N 5 E

ð9:39Þ

As a result, Eq. (9.32) becomes SNREDC 9

P ð11EÞ Nspans PASE 1 ηP 3 Nspans

1 ηζPASE P 2



P ð11EÞ Nspans PASE 1 ηP 3 Nspans

ð9:40Þ

where the approximation is due to the fact that for all power values and distances of interest the signal
signal NLI term, growing cubically with P, dominates the signal
ASE NLI, which grows quadratically. Eq. (9.40) represents the SNR when EDC only is used at the receiver to compensate for fiber CD. On the other hand DBP, by mitigating nonlinear distortions, can effectively reduce the cubic term. When it is possible to backpropagate the entire forward-propagated field E(t, L) at a distance L (commonly referred to as FF-DBP), the effect of DBP can be thought as generating a firstorder term with opposite sign to the nonlinear distortion term [25, Sect. 2], hence effectively canceling the signal
signal NLI power σ2S-S . The signal
ASE NLI term can be thought of as made up of multiple components, each one generated from the ASE noise of each amplifier along the link. As shown in Refs. [49,51,52], when the nonlinear compensation is performed entirely at the receiver, DBP undoes the signal
ASE NLI generated by the ASE noise term at the first span of the link. It also partially cancels the signal
ASE NLI power for the ASE noise component arising later in the link, up to the point where it was added. An artificial signal
ASE NLI is generated for the ASE noise terms backpropagated beyond the point where they were added. The balance is equal to the same σ2S-N occurring before DBP is applied [49,51]. The SNR after FF-DBP is applied is thus given by SNRFF-DBP 5

P 3ηζPASE P 2

ð9:41Þ

Comparing Eqs. (9.40) and (9.41) at the transmitted powers where each of the expressions reaches its maximum, we find that the theoretical gains achievable by FF-DBP can be well approximated (for Nspans $ 2): K rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi 

ΔSNR  1=3

η1=6 PASE

2 11 E 2Nspans 3

ð9:42Þ

2 3E 1 ð2 1 EÞNspans

where K is a constant given by rffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ffiffiffi 3p 21E 3 2 2U K5 4 3

ð9:43Þ

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

Eq. (9.42) shows that the SNR gain introduced by the full compensation of the signal
signal nonlinear term is weakly dependent on the fiber parameters (η) and on the amount of the amplifiers noise. On the contrary, it has a stronger dependence on the link distance (Nspans): since typically E , , 1, the SNR gain decreases approximately as the square root of the distance (as long as the span length is kept constant). Based on Eq. (9.42), one can observe that the SNR gains experienced by forcing the deterministic signal
signal nonlinearities to zero are very substantial. For instance, replacing the numbers for a 11 3 10 GBd superchannel system spaced at 10.2 GHz, when FF-DBP is applied, the SNR gain at 40 3 80 km of SSMF fiber is, according to the GN model, approximately equal to 8 dB. Additional gain can be obtained by splitting the backpropagation process between the transmitter (predistortion) and the receiver, as shown in Ref. [49]. This is due to the reduction of the σ2S-N term, which in the case of a 50%
50% split (optimal case), effectively accumulates only over half of the number of spans of the fiber link. This results in a further asymptotic (long distances) gain of 1.5 dB [49]. However, in most cases backpropagating the entire transmitted WDM BW might be unrealistic, both for complexity and networking reasons. Thus, it is interesting to calculate the SNR performance of DBP when a given portion of the transmitted BW is backpropagated. It can be shown that [25,52] to a first-order approximation, applying DBP over a given BW coherently subtracts the NLI term that the forward propagation would generate over the same BW. As a result, the residual signal
signal NLI term when DBP is operated over a certain BW is given by 11E σ2S-S 5 ½ηðBÞ 2 ηðBDBP ÞP 3 NASE

ð9:44Þ

where η(  ) denotes the dependency of the NLI coefficient either on the forwardpropagated BW (B) or backpropagated BW (BDBP). The relationship between η and the BW depends on the adopted model (see Refs. [20,25,27,48,50]) and remains an open research topic. However, for dispersion-unmanaged SSMF fibers using EDFA amplifiers, the scaling of η as a function of the propagated BW is given by η ~ ðB2 Þ

ð9:45Þ

The resulting SNR applying DBP over only a portion of the transmitted BW BDBP is therefore given by SNRDBP 5

P

ð9:46Þ ð11EÞ Nspans PASE 1 ½ηðBÞ 2 ηðBDBP ÞP 3 Nspans 1 ηζPASE P 2 where we assume that using DBP over the BW BDBP does not affect the η coefficient multiplying the residual signal
ASE term. Differently from Eq. (9.40) we notice that for any nonzero σ2S-S , the cubic term is always present at the denominator along with the signal
ASE NLI quadratic term.

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(A)

(B) 30 EDC 5Ch. 7Ch. 9Ch. FFDBP

SNR[dB]

SNR [dB]

20 15 EDC 5Ch. 7Ch. 9Ch. FFDBP

10 5 − 10

−5

0

5

20

10 10

1000

4000

8000

12000

Distance [km]

Launch power per channel [dBm]

(C)

(D) EDC-only Super-channelDBP

14

EDC Super-channelDBP

20

12

SNR [dB]

SNR [dB]

384

10 8

15 10

6 − 10

−8

−6

−4

−2

Launch power per channel [dBm]

0

5

1000

4000

8000

12000

Distance [km]

Figure 9.3 (A) Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as a function of transmitted power for the central subcarrier, for electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) only, 5-, 7-, and 9-channel digital backpropagation (DBP), and finally for full-field (FF) DBP. (B) Received SNR as a function of transmission distance for various DBP BWs. (C) SNR of the central subcarrier for 5.5 THz transmission system, both for EDC only and when the entire superchannel in backpropagated. (D) Corresponding SNR performance as a function of transmission distance.

At optimum launch power, the cubic term dominates the quadratic one (for all distances of interest) and as a result the signal
ASE term can be dropped from Eq. (9.46). We then obtain a DBP gain as a function of BDBP and B, given by sffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ηðBÞ 3 ð9:47Þ ΔSNRðBDBP ; BÞ ~ ηðBÞ 2 ηðBDBP Þ The significance of Eqs. (9.42) and (9.47) is in explicitly quantifying the SNR gains achievable as a function of backpropagated BW. In Fig. 9.3 we illustrate the result of the above equations for the transmission of the 11 3 10 GBaud superchannel (parameters in Table 9.2) as used experimentally in this submission and is described in the next section. Fig. 9.3A and B show the DBP performance of a single superchannel transmission, in terms of (Fig. 9.3A) SNR versus transmitted power PTX at 3200 km (40 3 80 km), and then (Fig. 9.3B) in terms of optimum SNR at a given distance, for different values of BDBP. In order to explore the validity of Eq. (9.42) for the achievable SNR gain, we additionally show the results of numerical simulations based on SSF algorithm using the same parameters as before. It can be seen that there is excellent agreement for all curves.

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

Table 9.2 Analyzed system parameters. Parameter description

Value

Subchannel symbol rate Superchannel subcarriers Roll-off Channel spacing EDFA noise figure Span length Fiber loss (α) Fiber dispersion coefficient (β 2) Fiber nonlinear coefficient (γ)

10 GBd 11 0% 10.2 GHz 4.5 dB 80 km 0.2 dB/km 221 ps2/km 1.2/W/km

However, a discrepancy is seen for powers .2 dBm per channel when the transmission moves into the highly nonlinear regime due to second-order nonlinearities, and the first-order perturbative analysis breaks down. Fig. 9.3A and B indicates that the DBP gain does not saturate with the DBP BW, but instead its rate of increase is larger as the FF BW B is approached. For example, in Fig. 9.3A 4 dB of additional gain can be obtained by backpropagating the outermost subchannels of the superchannel (9
11 subchannels). This additional “jump” can be explained because the residual signal
signal NLI term when backpropagating nine channels is still significantly larger than the signal
ASE term at optimum launch power, although being just a small fraction of the overall signal
signal NLI. Fig. 9.3C and D show instead the benefit of backpropagating the entire superchannel when transmitted along with 50 other superchannels in the C-band with no guard-band between the superchannels. Still, a gain of approximately 1 dB can be observed at 3200 km (see Fig. 9.3C), while a gain in distance of approximately 1000 km can be obtained at 10 dB SNR (see Fig. 9.3D). MC-DBP has been implemented as part of DSP functionality shown in Fig. 9.14, and its effectiveness was investigated for a range of modulation formats, as described in Refs. [16,53]. Overall, the use of DBP can offer significant improvements in performance. SNR gains of up to 8 dB over 3200 km are possible (decreasing to 5 dB at 10,000 km) for a single superchannel system, resulting in an additional 1.6 bits/sym in terms of spectral efficiency (SE) (assuming log2(1 1 SNR)) and 176 Gbit/s higher capacity. For fully populated EDFA BW (50 Nyquist-spaced subchannels), this results in additional 6.25 Tbit/s of capacity at 3200 km. However, in practice, gains are reduced by the transceiver noise interactions.

9.3 Digital nonlinearity compensation in presence of laser phase noise In dispersion-unmanaged transmission systems, laser phase noise can be converted into amplitude noise, due to the phase modulation to amplitude modulation conversion

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induced by the group velocity dispersion in the fiber [54,55]. In DSP-based coherent system, this phenomenon leads to an interaction between laser phase noise and EDC, inducing an effect of equalization enhanced phase noise (EEPN) [56,57]. The EEPN has already been identified as a source of significant degradation in the performance of single-channel transmission systems, increasing with fiber dispersion, local oscillator (LO) laser linewidth, modulation format, and symbol rate [56
65]. In multichannel transmission, the effects of fiber nonlinearities are more significant as the channel spacing is decreased to Nyquist spacing. Compared to conventional single-channel DBP for SPM compensation, considerable benefits can be obtained by applying MC-DBP over the entire superchannel BW, for example, see Section 9.2.1. This allows the compensation for interchannel nonlinear effects such as XPM and FWM across the entire superchannel. MC-DBP can also be operated at different digital BWs, involving different numbers of subchannels to achieve a compromise between the performance improvement and the computational complexity [42,66]. Several factors influencing superchannel transmission, MC-DBP, and nonlinear precompensation have been studied, such as the impact of nonlinear signal-noise interaction, accumulated PMD, comb carrier frequency uncertainty, and LO phase imperfect synchronization [21,47,67,68]. However, to date, no investigation of the effects of EEPN on the performance of multichannel transmission and MC-DBP has been reported. In fact, EEPN may significantly distort the performance of such schemes, especially when the CD must be simultaneously compensated over the entire superchannel BW, such as in the case of the use of FF-DBP. The impact of EEPN may differ for different subchannels within the same superchannel, which must be taken into consideration for the optimization of optical fiber networks. Therefore, it is of both great practical importance and interest to study the impact of EEPN on the performance of superchannel transmission systems for both EDC and MC-DBP. In this section, the origin and influence of EEPN on the performance of the longhaul Nyquist-spaced superchannel transmission system are described, with and without the use of MC-DBP [69]. Analysis has been carried in a Nyquist-spaced 9-channel 32Gbaud dual-polarizations 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-64QAM) WDM superchannel system, with a total raw capacity of 3.456-Tbit/s. The achievable transmission distance of this superchannel system was evaluated both numerically, using the SSF algorithm, and analytically, using the perturbation GN model. The performance of each subchannel in the 9-channel DP-64QAM superchannel transmission system was investigated in detail to assess the origin and the influence of EEPN. Our results indicate that with both EDC and MC-DBP, EEPN causes a significant deterioration in the performance of all subchannels, with penalties more severe for the outer subchannels. Meanwhile, it is also shown that the source of EEPN, from the transmitter laser or the LO laser, depends on the relative position between the CPE and the MC-DBP (or the EDC) modules.

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

Figure 9.4 Schematic of equalization enhanced phase noise (EEPN) in optical fiber communication system using electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) (or digital backpropagation, DBP): (A) the DSP scenario for carrier phase estimation (CPE) applied after EDC; (B) the digital signal processing (DSP) scenario for CPE applied prior to EDC; and (C) the phase variation due to frequency perturbation in dispersion compensation in EDC (or multichannel backpropagation, MC-DBP). PRBS, pseudorandom bit sequence; Ch, channel.

Fig. 9.4 schematically shows the origin of EEPN in long-haul coherent optical communication systems, in which electronic CD postcompensation and CPECPE are employed. In Fig. 9.4, two scenarios are considered within the DSP modules: (A) CD compensation applied prior to CPE and (B) CD compensation applied after CPE. Generally, scenario (A) is more common for DSP operation in digital coherent receivers, since the required minimum oversampling rate (1 sample/symbol) in the CPE operation is less than that in the EDC and the MC-DBP operations and some adaptive CPE algorithms can also affect the performance of the dispersion compensation [10,62,70]. It has been indicated that laser phase noise can be converted into amplitude noise by CD [54,55]. Taking scenario (A) in Fig. 9.4 as an example, the phase noise from the transmitter laser passes through both the transmission fiber and the EDC module, so the net experienced dispersion is close to zero. The phase noise from the LO laser only goes through the EDC module in the receiver, which is heavily dispersed in systems without any optical dispersion compensation. Thus, the LO phase noise will interplay with the EDC module leading to the effect of phase noise to amplitude noise conversion, and the induced EEPN will affect the performance of long-haul high-speed optical transmission systems [56
65]. Previous work has also demonstrated that the EEPN arises from the nonzero net dispersion experienced by the laser phase noise, either from the transmitter laser or the LO laser [71,72]. Therefore, the EEPN originates from the interaction between the LO laser phase noise and the EDC (or the DBP) module in case (A), or from the interplay between the transmitter laser phase and the fiber dispersion in case (B). According to the

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different origins of EEPN, the effect can be categorized into equalization enhanced LO phase noise (EELOPN) for case (A) and equalization enhanced transmitter phase noise (EETXPN) for case (B). The representations of the EELOPN (EEELOPN(t)) and the EETXPN (EETXPN (t)) in the time domain can be described by the following equations: EEELOPN ðtÞ 5 ½ATX ALO UejφLO ðtÞ   gEDC ðL; tÞ

ð9:48Þ

EEETXPN ðtÞ 5 ½ATX ALO UejφTX ðtÞ   gFibre ðL; tÞ

ð9:49Þ

where ATX and ALO are the amplitudes of the transmitter laser carrier and the LO laser optical wave, respectively, φTX(t) and φLO(t) are the phase fluctuation in the transmitter laser and the LO laser, respectively, gEDC(L, t) is the time-domain transfer function of the EDC filter, Fiber(L, t) is the time-domain transfer function of the fiber, L is the fiber length, t represents the temporal variable, and  indicates the convolution operation. Taking scenario (A) as an example. The transfer function GEDC(L, ω) of the EDC filter in the frequency domain, which is the Fourier transform of the time-domain transfer function gEDC(L, t), can be expressed as follows: [6,7]   Dλ2 L 2 ω GEDC ðL; ωÞ 5 exp j ð9:50Þ 4πc As shown Fig. 9.4C, the phase of the EDC filter in Eq. (9.50) varies quadratically with frequency, which increases the gradient at a higher relative frequency (further from the central channel carrier frequency). For the same perturbation Δω in the frequency (e.g., the frequency shift due to the laser linewidth), the phase variation Δφ2 caused by the perturbation at a higher relative frequency is larger than the phase variation Δφ1 induced by the frequency perturbation at a lower relative frequency. Therefore, the interplay between the laser phase noise and the EDC module will be greater at a higher relative frequency and will generate a more significant EEPN. Correspondingly, for the superchannel transmission systems, the outer subchannels (e.g., channel 4 in Fig. 9.4C) will be impacted by more serious EEPN than the central subchannel (e.g., channel 0 in Fig. 9.4C), when the dispersion compensation is applied over the entire superchannel simultaneously. It is clear then that, when only linear EDC is applied, it is beneficial to compensate only the intrachannel dispersion. However, it is a prerequisite of MC-DBP that the EDC is applied over all subchannels simultaneously. The implications of this are investigated in more detail in the following sections. The setup of the 9-channel 32-Gbaud DP-64QAM superchannel transmission system is schematically illustrated in Fig. 9.5, and all numerical simulations were carried

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

Figure 9.5 Schematic of 9-channel dual-polarizations 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-64QAM) superchannel transmission system using the electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) or the multichannel backpropagation (MC-DBP): (A) the digital signal processing (DSP) scenario for carrier phase estimation (CPE) applied after EDC (or MC-DBP); (B) the DSP scenario for CPE applied prior to EDC (or MC-DBP); (and C) the simulated transmission spectrum and the schematic of backpropagated BW in the 9-channel DP-64QAM superchannel transmission system, where the frequency 0 Hz refers to the superchannel central frequency (wavelength of 1550 nm). PBS, polarization beam splitter; PBC polarization beam combiner.

out using the SSF algorithm to solve the Manakov equation with a digital resolution of 32 sample/symbol. In the transmitter, a 9-line 32-GHz spaced laser comb (centered at 1550 nm) is used as the phase-locked optical carrier for each subchannel. Digital-toanalog converter (DAC) with a resolution of 16-bit (to ensure no B2B implementation penalty) and root raised cosine (RRC) filter with a roll-off of 0.1% were used for the Nyquist pulse shaping. The transmitted symbol sequences were decorrelated with a delay of 256 symbols using a cyclical time shift to emulate the independent data transmission in each subchannel, and the sequences in each polarization were also decorrelated with a delay of half the sequence length. The SSMF is simulated based on the SSF method with a step size of 0.1 km, and the detailed parameters are span length of 80 km, attenuation coefficient of 0.2 dB/km, CD coefficient of 17 ps/nm/km, nonlinear coefficient of 1.2/W/km. The dispersion slope and PMD effect were neglected. The noise figure of the EDFA was set to 4.5 dB. At the receiver, the received signal was mixed with a free running LO laser and sampled at 32 samples/ symbol, without any BW limitation, which allows an ideal and synchronous detection of all the in-phase and quadrature signal components over the whole superchannel

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BW. The DSP modules include a RRC filter for selecting the MC-DBP BW, followed by MC-DBP (or linear EDC), down-sampling (to 2 samples/symbol), MF, multiple modulus algorithm equalization, ideal CPE, symbol de-mapping, and bit-error-rate (BER) measurement. The ideal CPE was realized by using the conjugate multiplication between the received signal and laser carrier phase, to isolate the influence of EEPN from the intrinsic laser phase noise. Corresponding to Fig. 9.4, the same two scenarios are considered in the simulations: (A) ideal CPE applied after the EDC/MC-DBP and (B) ideal CPE applied prior to the EDC/MC-DBP, as shown in Fig. 9.5A and B, respectively. The spectrum of the 9-channel DP-64QAM coherent transmission system is shown in Fig. 9.5C, where the number represents the subchannel within the superchannel. In all simulations, the MC-DBP algorithm was operated with the 800 steps per span and the nonlinear coefficient of 1.2 W/km to ensure optimum operation of nonlinear compensation. Influence of EEPN in superchannel transmission using EDC and MC-DBP. The performance of all the subchannels in the 9-channel DP-64QAM superchannel transmission system was investigated in terms of Q2 factors (converted directly from BERs), evaluated both using the EDC and the 9-channel (full-BW) DBP. Corresponding to previous descriptions, two DSP scenarios were considered to assess the origin and the impact of EEPN: (A) CPE implemented after the DBP/EDC and (B) CPE implemented prior to the DBP/EDC. In the practical long-haul superchannel transmission system where a nonzero linewidth of the TX and the LO lasers exists, the impact of EEPN should be considered. As described above, due to the larger phase slope for the outer subchannels in the dispersion compensation filter (or the fiber dispersion) transfer function, the outer subchannels will have a more significant EEPN than the central subchannel, which will generate a more serious distortion. Therefore, the side subchannels will exhibit a worse performance than the central subchannel due to the more significant EEPN. The performance of all the subchannels in the Nyquist-spaced 9-channel DP-64QAM superchannel system with a transmission distance of 880 km (11 fiber spans) is illustrated in Fig. 9.6, in which a significant EEPN has been applied. Again, two DSP scenarios are considered in the numerical simulations: Fig. 9.6A shows results for the ideal CPE realized after the DBP/EDC, and Fig. 9.6B shows the results for the ideal CPE implemented prior to the DBP/EDC. To investigate the origin and the impact of EEPN, different distributions of the linewidths from the TX laser and the LO laser have been applied: (1) the TX laser linewidth is 100 kHz, and the LO laser linewidth is 0 Hz, (2) both the TX laser and the LO laser linewidths are 50 kHz, (3) the Tx laser linewidth is 0 Hz, and the LO linewidth is 100 kHz. It can be found in Fig. 9.6A that the EEPN originates from the interaction between the LO laser phase noise and the EDC/DBP module, corresponding to the case of equalization enhanced LO phase noise. With the increment of the LO laser linewidth (from 0 Hz to 100 kHz) in

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

(A) 10

TX: 100 kHz LO: 0 Hz DBP TX: 100 kHz LO: 0 Hz EDC TX: 0 Hz LO: 100 kHz DBP TX: 0Hz LO: 100 kHz EDC TX: 50 kHz LO: 50 kHz DBP TX: 50 kHz LO: 50 kHz EDC

Q 2 factor(dB)

9 8 7 6 5 4 −4

−3

−2 −1 0 1 2 Sub-channel index

3

4

Q 2 factor(dB)

(B) 10

TX: 100 kHz LO: 0 Hz DBP TX: 100 kHz LO: 0 Hz EDC TX: 0 Hz LO: 100 kHz DBP TX: 0 Hz LO: 100 kHz EDC TX: 50 kHz LO: 50 kHz DBP Tx: 50 kHz LO: 50 kHz EDC

8

6

4 −4

−3

−2 −1 0 1 2 Sub-channel index

3

4

Figure 9.6 Performance of each subchannel in Nyquist-spaced 9-channel dual-polarizations 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-64QAM) transmission system influenced by equalization enhanced phase noise (EEPN). The simulation is carried out under different distributions of the transmitter (TX) and the local oscillator (LO) laser linewidths, and both the electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) and the digital backpropagation (DBP) have been applied over the whole superchannel: (A) the scenario for ideal carrier phase estimation (CPE) implemented after EDC/DBP and (B) the scenario for ideal CPE implemented before EDC/DBP.

Fig. 9.6A, the outer subchannels exhibit a significantly worse performance than the central subchannel due to the EEPN induced additional noise, in both cases of the EDC and the FF-DBP. When the TX laser linewidth is 100 kHz and the LO laser linewidth is 0 Hz, the performance of all the subchannels shows a similar behavior, and is almost the same as for the ideal case (both Tx and LO laser linewidths are 0 Hz). Thus, there is no EEPN influence in this scenario, since the interplay between the TX laser phase noise and fiber dispersion can be fully compensated either by EDC or DBP. The performance of all the subchannels in the superchannel transmission system in Fig. 9.6B is exactly reversed compared to Fig. 9.6A, where the EEPN arises from the interaction between the TX laser phase noise and fiber dispersion, corresponding to the case of equalization-enhanced TX phase noise. Fig. 9.7 shows the degradation in the performance of all the subchannels in the 9channel DP-64QAM transmission system with the increment of the EEPN, where an increase in the TX or the LO laser linewidths is applied. The transmission distance is again 880 km (11 fiber spans). In Fig. 9.7A, the TX laser linewidth is kept at 0 Hz and

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Q 2 factor (dB)

(A) 10 8 6

0 Hz 0 Hz 100 kHz 100 kHz 250 kHz 250 kHz

DBP EDC DBP EDC DBP EDC

0 Hz 0 Hz 100 kHz 100 kHz 250 kHz 250 kHz

DBP EDC DBP EDC DBP EDC

4 2 −4

−3

−2 −1 0 1 2 Sub-channel index

3

4

(B) 10 Q 2 factor (dB)

392

8 6 4 2 −4

−3

−2 −1 0 1 2 Sub-channel index

3

4

Figure 9.7 Performance of each subchannel in Nyquist-spaced 9-channel dual-polarizations 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-64QAM) transmission system influenced by equalization enhanced phase noise (EEPN), where both the electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) and the digital backpropagation (DBP) have been applied over the whole superchannel. (A) The carrier phase estimation (CPE) implemented after the electronic dispersion compensation/digital backpropagation (EDC/DBP); the transmitter (TX) laser linewidth is 0 Hz and the indicated linewidth is for the local oscillator (LO) laser. (B) The carrier phase estimation (CPE) implemented before the EDC/ DBP; the LO laser linewidth is 0 Hz and the indicated linewidth is for the TX laser.

the LO laser linewidth is varied from 0 to 250 kHz. In Fig. 9.7B, the LO laser linewidth is kept at 0 Hz and the TX laser linewidth is varied over the range from 0 to 250 kHz. It can be found that, in both cases using the EDC and the FF-DBP, the performance of the transmission system is significantly degraded by EEPN with the increment of the laser linewidth, and the performance of the outer subchannels behaves worse than the central subchannel with the increment of the laser linewidth, due to the more severe EEPN induced from the quadratic phase distribution of the EDC (or the fiber dispersion) transfer function. It is also found that the EEPN rises with the increment of the LO laser linewidth in Fig. 9.7A since the EEPN originates from LO laser phase noise for the case of CPE implemented after the EDC/DBP, and the EEPN rises with the increment of the TX laser linewidth in Fig. 9.7B since the EEPN originates from TX laser phase noise for the case of CPE implemented prior to

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

the EDC/DBP. In addition, it has also been verified in our simulation that, to ensure that the Q2 factor in all the subchannels is above the 20% overhead hard-decision preforward-error correction (pre-FEC) BER threshold (1.5 3 1022) in the FF-DBP scheme, the EEPN puts a limitation on the maximum tolerable linewidth (around 60 kHz for our system) on the LO laser in the case of CPE implemented after DBP, and the TX laser in the case of CPE implemented before DBP. It is worth noting that the dispersion compensation in both the EDC and the FFDBP were applied over the entire superchannel BW in all the above analysis. In the forward propagation along the fiber, the phase delay in each subchannel is different, since the fiber dispersion profile (quadratic shape) is different in different frequency bands. Thus, the carrier phase will have different delays in the fiber for different subchannels. In the receiver, if the dispersion is compensated over the entire superchannel simultaneously, the EDC filter will have the same dispersion profile as the fiber over the superchannel BW, and thus the carrier phase in all subchannels will be synchronized, and the phase noise can be compensated perfectly by applying the conjugate multiplication with the original carrier phase. According to the above investigations, the outer subchannels will suffer more pronounced EEPN than the central subchannel in such case. On the other hand, if the dispersion is compensated on an individual subchannel basis (using a frequency shift and a MF applied before EDC), the EDC filter will be designed separately by only considering the frequency range within each subchannel. Thus the overall phase response will be different from the fiber response over the whole superchannel BW. The carrier phase after the EDC will have different delays in different subchannels, and the phase noise in the outer subchannels cannot be perfectly removed by applying the conjugate multiplication with the original carrier phase, which is only synchronized with the central subchannel, and additional phase delays need to be considered in the ideal CPE. In this case, the impact of EEPN on the specific outer subchannel can be reduced to some extent, and will be the same as that in the central subchannel. Note that practical CPE algorithms work in both cases for compensating the intrinsic carrier phase noise, since the CPE algorithms only consider the current carrier phase noise in the measured subchannel. However, as previously noted, the dispersion compensation in the MC-DBP (or FF-DBP) has to be applied simultaneously over the whole backpropagated subchannels, since all the information of the NLI in the involved subchannels is required for the MC-DBP to cancel both the intrachannel and the interchannel nonlinearities. In this case, the EEPN in the outer subchannels in Nyquist superchannel transmission systems cannot be reduced. EEPN originates from the interplay between the laser phase noise and the dispersion in the long-haul optical communication system using the EDC or the DBP, and significantly impacts the performance of the transmission system. The digital coherence enhancement based approaches can achieve an effective mitigation for the EEPN, while an independent measurement (or a complicated phase decorrelation) to estimate

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the LO laser phase fluctuation is necessary [65,73,74]. The EEPN can also be mitigated efficiently by applying a certain cutoff frequency to the LO laser, whereas a high-pass filtering based on electrical feedback or digital coherence enhancement is required to suppress the frequency noise [75].

9.4 Signal design for spectrally efficient optical transmission 9.4.1 Coded modulation Coded modulation (CM) is the combination of multilevel modulation formats and forward error correction (FEC) codes, and is nowadays one of key techniques to maximize the SE of communication systems. This technique is typically used together with digital spectral shaping, which is aimed at reducing, as much as possible, the BW occupancy of information channels operating at a given symbol rate, or equivalently maximize the information throughput for a given transmission BW. As the optical BW becomes an increasingly precious commodity, this is a crucial aspect in the design of modern optical communications systems. Research on CM dates back to the 1980s, originating from seminal works in Refs. [76,77] that highlighted the importance of combining coding and higher order modulation formats in order to achieve capacity in the so-called BW-limited transmission regime, that is, where (theoretically) unlimited transmission power can be used but only limited BW is available. Due to the increasing data rate demand and the consequent introduction of high-speed optical coherent detection systems, CM has also become a key technology in optical communications [78
83]. CM has enabled all of the most recent optical transmission hero experiments achieving SEs in excess of 7 b/s/Hz over transoceanic distances [84
86]. Fig. 9.8A illustrates an example of a generic CM system in the context of optical fiber transmission. The CM transmitter (CM TX) can be seen as a nonbinary encoder that maps a sequence of uniformly distributed information bits1 (i) of length Nb to sequences of vectors (x) of length Ns. Each vector of complex symbols belongs to the codebook, B 5 fx 1 ; x2 ; . . .; x 2Nb g; where 2Nb is the number of possible transmitted messages. The sequence of symbols is subsequently traxnsmitted over the optical channel, which includes a single-mode optical fiber, optical amplification devices, and the transceiver subsystems with their corresponding DSP implementations. The CM receiver (CM RX) attempts to estimate the transmitted vector, x, from the received noisy symbols y. The CM TX and RX in Fig. 9.8A can be in practice implemented in different ways, each showing a different trade-off between performance and complexity. The most popular approaches to CM can be classified within three main categories: trellis1

The information bits are assumed to have passed through a source encoder for data compression.

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

(A)

MI CM TX i

CM RX x

Encoder

y Optical channel

iˆ Decoder

(B) MI

CM TX i

Binary encoder

c

Memoryless mapper

x

Bit-wise RX y

Optical channel

Memoryless de-mapper

HD de-mapper

Λ

Binary decoder

iˆ

cˆ

Figure 9.8 Coded modulation (CM). (A) CM system using the optimal maximum likelihood (ML) decoder. The mutual information (introduced in Sec. 9.4.2) is estimated using the transmitted and received symbols. (B) Bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM) system illustrating the variables used (discussed in Sec. 9.4.2), pre-SD-FEC BER (BERpre) and post-SD-FEC bit-error-rate (BERpost).

coded modulation (TCM) [76], multilevel coding (MLC) [87], and BICM [88]. In TCM, convolutional codes are used and jointly designed with the mapper in order to maximize the Euclidean distance between different codewords. Due to the structure of the transmitted codewords, the maximum likelihood (ML) decoder for TCM can be implemented using the Viterbi algorithm. In the case of MLC, the sequence of information bits is separated into a number of parallel streams. A set of parallel encoders (using in general different codes) are used to encode the different streams. The decoder is usually implemented using the so-called multistage decoding approach, where the decoding of each bit stream is used recursively as an input for the decoder of the subsequent bit stream. In both TCM and MLC the encoding and mapping stages need to be jointly designed, thus resulting in a monolithic and inflexible CM structure which also requires a relatively complex decoding stage. Finally, in the BICM case, the CM TX is implemented as a concatenation of a binary encoder and a memoryless mapper. This approach significantly simplifies the decoder which can be also split in a memoryless demapper and a binary decoder. More importantly, BICM decouples completely modulation and FEC, giving the designer increased flexibility and allowing the optimization of the FEC and modulation structures in a disjoint manner. This is the reason why BICM is the most popularly adopted CM technique, including the optical communications world. The BICM architecture is shown in greater detail in Fig. 9.8B. At the CM TX, information bits are passed into the binary encoder, which adds redundancy (for error correction at the receiver) and operates at a code rate, R 5 Nb/Nc, where Nc is the

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number of coded bits (c). The coded bits are mapped to a set of discrete constellation points using a memoryless mapper and are then transmitted over the optical channel. Although the ML sequence decoder can be used also for this transmitter architecture, the high complexity associated with this decoder renders its implementation in realworld systems infeasible. Therefore, a more feasible (albeit suboptimal) receiver would use a simple two-step decoding process that decouples the decoder and demapper into two distinct processes. This bit-wise receiver (Bit-Wise RX) structure is the key functional block in a BICM-based system [89], as shown in Fig. 9.8B. The Bit-Wise RX consists of a memoryless demapper and a soft decision (SD) FEC decoder. The demapper calculates a ratio of probabilities [known as log likelihood ratios (LLRs)], Λ, that are passed into the binary decoder and are used to estimate the transmitted bits. The decoded bits are subsequently used to calculate the post-SD-FEC bit-error-rate (BERpost), while the pre-SD-FEC BER (BERpre) is calculated by passing the received symbols through a hard-decision demapper. These two BER quantities are schematically shown in Fig. 9.8B and will be used throughout this work, along with the mutual information (MI) and generalized mutual information (GMI) introduced in the following section, to demonstrate the performance of our complete system.

9.4.2 Mutual information and generalized mutual information Information theory addresses the fundamental question as to the maximum amount of information that can be reliably transmitted through any channel [90,91]. The mutual information (MI) between the transmitted and received symbols is a key quantity, as it represents the maximum achievable information rate (IR)2 for a CM system based on the ML sequence decoder. The MI has been analyzed in the context of the optical channel and has been previously employed as a performance metric for digital optical communications systems [92
96]. Experimental demonstrations have verified the use of MI to predict the BERpost in optical systems based on the DP-QPSK format [97] and recently for DP-8QAM [98]. The MI has also been used as a figure of merit for WDM transmission systems based on the m-ary QAM format [99,100]. In this chapter, an experimental measurement of information theoretic quantities such as MI and GMI is performed, showing that modulation format and code rate of a practical CM optical system must be simultaneously optimized to match the specific SNR achieved after digital coherent detection. In addition to this, we depart from uniformly shaped constellations to consider the use of probabilistic shaping (Section 9.4.2.1) to maximize the IR of our system. Let X be a random variable representing the transmitted symbol taking values in X 5 {x1, x2,. . ., xm} and pX(xi) for i 5 1, 2, . . .M its probability mass function (PMF). 2

A rate is said to be achievable if there exists an encoder operating at that rate and a decoder giving a vanishing error probability as the block length tends to infinity.

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

Let then Y be a random variable taking values in the complex field C and modeling the received symbol, where pY|X (y|xi) for i 5 1, 2,. . .,m is a family of conditional probability density functions statistically defining the channel. The MI for discrete constellations and memoryless channels is defined as ð m X pY jX ðyjxi Þ MI 5 pX ðxi Þ pY jX ðyjxi Þ log Pm dy: ð9:51Þ C j51 pX ðxj ÞpyjX ðyjxj Þ i51 The MI defines the maximum rate (typically in bit/symbol) at which reliable communication is possible over a given channel for a given modulation format and an optimum CM scheme [91, Theorem 7.7.1]. Such an optimal CM scheme, in turn, entails an optimum bit-to-symbol mapping, optimal FEC (including potentially infinitely long codewords), and an ML receiver. As discussed in Section 9.4.1, practical CM structures typically use the BICM scheme. Under this constraint, it was shown that the MI is not an accurate indicator, either in terms of rate achievability or in terms of post-FEC BER performance at a given CM rate [83]. An alternative information theoretic quantity was proposed in Ref. [88] to characterize the performance of BICM systems. This quantity is referred to as bit-wise MI or more notably as GMI. The GMI is defined as [89] GMI 5

log 2m X

IðBk ; Y Þ

ð9:52Þ

k51

where I(Bk; Y) is the MI between the kth bit Bk in a transmitted symbol X and the corresponding received symbol Y. The GMI was shown to be an achievable IR (although not necessarily the largest) for the BICM system in Fig. 9.8B [88], [89, Chapter 4]. For equally likely transmitted symbols Eq. (9.52) can be rewritten as P log2 ðmÞ X X ð 1 X jAℐb fY jX ðyjxj Þ GMI 5 log2 m 1 fY jX ðyjxi Þlog2 Pm k dy ð9:53Þ m k51 bAf0;1g b C p51 fY jX ðyjxk Þ iAℐk

where ℐbk is the subset of points in X having kth bit equal to b. From Eq. (9.53) it can be deduced that, unlike the MI, the GMI is not only a function of the channel law and the constellation shape (coordinates and symbol probability of occurrence), but also of the bit-to-symbol mapping. As shown in [83], the GMI is a reliable indicator to estimate the post-FEC BER of good BICM schemes operating at a given IR. The computation of the MI and GMI for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel is typically performed using two different numerical integration

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strategies [101]: (1) Monte Carlo integration and (2) Gauss
Hermite quadrature. For the AWGN channel, the channel law is given by   1 jy 2 xj2 pY jX ðyjxÞ 5 exp 2 ð9:54Þ πσ2z σ2z where σ2z is the noise (complex) noise variance. Using Eq. (9.54) in Eq. (9.51), the MI becomes MI 5

m X

pX ðxi Þ log2

i51 m 1X 2 m i51

1 pX ðxi Þ

! jxi 2 xj j2 1 2Rfðxi 2 xj Þz g dz fZ ðzÞ log2 exp 2 σ2z C j51

ð

m X

ð9:55Þ

where ZBCN ð0; σ2z Þ. In a similar way the GMI for the AWGN channel and equally likely symbols is given by GMI 5 log2 m jxi 2 xp j2 1 2Rfðxi 2 xp Þz g exp 2 p51 σ2z

Pm

log2 m X X ð 1X 2 fZ ðzÞ log2 m k51 bAf0;1g P b C

!

jxi 2 xj j2 1 2Rfðxi 2 xj Þz g 2 b exp jAℐk σ2z

iAℐk

! dz

ð9:56Þ Eqs. (9.55) and (9.56) can be computed using the Monte Carlo approximation ð C

f ðxÞgðxÞ dx 

Ns 1 X gðxn Þ Ns n51

ð9:57Þ

where xn are samples from a random variable X B f (x). Using Eq. (9.57) in both Eqs. (9.55) and (9.56) we obtain for the MI and GMI, respectively, MI 

m X i51

pX ðxi Þ log2

1 pX ðxi Þ

Ns m X m X jxi 2 xj j2 1 2Rfðxi 2 xj Þz ½ng 1 X log2 exp 2 2 mNs i51 n51 σ2z j51

!

ð9:58Þ

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

GMI  log2 m jxi 2 xp j2 1 2Rfðxi 2 xp Þz ½ng exp 2 p51 σ2z

Pm log2 m X X X Ns 1 X log2 2 mNs k51 bAf0;1g P b n51

!

jxi 2 xj j2 1 2Rfðxi 2 xj Þz ½ng 2 b exp jAℐk σ2z

iAℐk

!

ð9:59Þ where z[n] are samples from the random variable Z, R{  } denotes real part and Ns is the number of Monte Carlo samples. In Fig. 9.9 the MI and GMI are computed for AWGN and mQAM modulation formats for mA{4, 16, 64, 256}. The common binary reflected Gray code is here assumed to be the labeling choice. For 4QAM and 16QAM modulation formats, MI and GMI assume very similar values across the whole range of rates (0 to log2 m). For higher order QAM (64 and 256 QAM), the gap between MI and GMI is more significant at low to medium code rates (R # 0.8). This indicates a larger SNR penalty when BICM as opposed to other (more complex) CM schemes is used at low FEC rates and higher order modulation formats. This is the case for instance when 256QAM is used in the SNR range of 5
12 dB (see Fig. 9.9). At high rates (R $ 0.8), the gap between MI and GMI is negligible for all modulation formats.

Information rate [b/sym]

8

6

4QAM 16QAM 64QAM 256QAM MI GMI

4

2

0 −10 −5

0

5

10

15

20

25 30

SNR [dB]

Figure 9.9 Mutual information (MI) and generalized mutual information (GMI) for mQAM modulation formats in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.

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9.4.3 Constellation shaping A technique that can be used in combination with CM to further increase SE is constellation shaping [102]. Constellation shaping consists in varying the transmitted symbols distribution, that is, their location and probability of occurrence, in order to maximize the IR through a given communication channel. One of the main results in information theory shows that, for asymptotically large constellation cardinalities, there is a 1.53 dB SNR gap between the highest achievable IR for a FEC scheme over a regular mQAM constellation and the Shannon capacity in the AWGN channel [103]. This gap can be reduced (and asymptotically closed) using constellation shaping. Constellation shaping techniques fall into two main categories: probabilistic shaping and geometrical shaping. In the following sections both approaches are discussed. 9.4.3.1 Probabilistic shaping Using CM schemes where symbols can be transmitted using nonuniform probabilities while retaining a regular constellation geometry (e.g., mQAM modulation) is known as probabilistic shaping (see, e.g., [77,102,104] and a detailed review in Ref. [105, Sect. II]). For the AWGN channel with an average power constraint, this shaping techniques yield a sensitivity gain of up to 1.53 dB relative to uniform QAM as the constellation cardinality tends to infinity [87, Sect. VIII-A]. This SNR margin results in increased achievable IR for SNR-limited digital coherent transceivers [106]. Therefore, probabilistic shaping is a viable candidate to transmit high SE over longer transmission distances in future optical fiber systems and has already been demonstrated in several works for mQAM systems (see, e.g., [82,107,108]). Geometrical shaping has also been demonstrated in fiber experiments (e.g., [109,110]); however, this shaping alternative imposes a constraint on the required effective number of bits (ENOB) of the DAC due to the unequally spaced constellation points. Instead, probabilistic shaping does not require any modification of the constellation geometry and its complexity is moved to the encoder and decoder, making it more compatible with existing QAM systems. Additionally, probabilistic shaping is also known to give larger gains than geometrical shaping for square QAM with a fixed number of constellation points, as shown in Ref. [89, Fig. 4.8]. For fiber transmission in the presence of nonlinearities, probabilistic shaping has been shown to improve transmission performance. Different input PMFs have been studied in simulations. These include dyadic PMFs and PMFs obtained from the Blahut
Arimoto algorithm [111, Sect. II], ring-like constellations [82, Sect. III], the Maxwell
Boltzmann PMF [112, Sect. V-B], [113, Sect. 2.3], [95, Sect. 3.5], and other nonlinearity-tailored distributions [114]. Recently, reach increases were experimentally demonstrated in Refs. [107,115] using a finite number of Maxwell
Boltzmann

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

distributions. These distributions were chosen to target different net data rates, and shaping gains over a transmission range of more than 4500 km were reported. Finding a good nonuniform input distribution for QAM constellations is a twodimensional (2D) optimization problem. However, because of the symmetry of the 2D constellation, of the binary reflected Gray labeling that is typically used, and the AWGN channel for which the optimization is carried out, it is sufficient to consider a one-dimensional (1D) constellation [116]. Under these assumptions, mQAM constellations can be decomposed into a product of two constituent 1D (pulse amplitude modulation) constellations, each with pffiffiffiffi M 5 m constellation points. Without loss of generality, we therefore consider only one of the quadratures for the shaping optimization; however, we emphasize that the analysis in Section 9.4.3.3 is performed for 2D (mQAM) constellations on each polarization. Let x 5 [x1, x2,. . .,xM] denote the real-valued constellation symbols, represented by the random variable X. We assume that the symbols are distributed according to a PMF P X 5 [PX(x1), PX(x2),. . .,PX(xM)] and that they are sorted in ascending order (i.e., xi , xi11, i 5 1, 2,. . .., M 2 1). To obtain the results presented later in Section 9.4.3.3, the input symbols are shaped using a PMF from the family of Maxwell
Boltzmann distributions, which are well known to be optimal for the AWGN channel (see, e.g., [104, Sect. IV], [87, Sect. VIII-A], [105, Sect. III-C]). Following the approach of [105, Sect. III-C], the shaped input is distributed as PX ðxi Þ 5 PM

1

k51

e2vxi

2

2νx2k

e

ð9:60Þ

where ν is a scaling factor. To find the optimal PMF among all distributions given by Eq. (9.60), let the positive scalar Δ denote a constellation scaling of X. Fixing Δ and the SNR for which the optimization is carried out (denoted shaping SNR in the following), the scaling factor is chosen such that E[|ΔX|2] 5 SNR 5 Es/N0 where Es represents the signal power and N0 represents the noise power. The MI between the scaled channel input ΔX and the AWGN channel output is unimodal in Δ, and thus, the scaling factor is chosen to maximize the MI at a given rate. Although this optimization is carried out for symbol-wise MI, the loss from considering a bit-wise decoder [89] gives a negligible achievable IR penalty [105, Table III]. In order to implement probabilistic shaping, the data sequence to be transmitted must be transformed into a sequence with unequal per-symbol probabilities. A constant composition distribution matcher [117] imposes a desired distribution on a block of uniform bits, and this shaped sequence is then encoded with a systematic FEC encoder and mapped onto QAM symbols [105]. At the receiver, the received shaped bits after FEC decoding are fed into a distribution dematcher that undoes the

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8 6

7

5.6

6

1.1 dB 18

19

4.2

MI [b/sym]

402

5 4 3 2 1

4 3.8

0.8 dB 11.8 12.6 64QAM 64QAMShaped 256QAM 256QAMShaped Capacity

2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 26 28 30 SNR [dB]

Figure 9.10 MI as a function of SNR for probabilistically shaped 64- and 256-QAM formats in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. The black dashed line shows the Shannon capacity of the AWGN channel.

matching operation of the transmitter. In order to see the full shaping gain after decoding, the LLR calculation must take into account the input distribution, and the bit mapping must be optimized for each FEC scheme used. Fig. 9.10 shows numerical simulations for the AWGN channel for 64QAM and 256QAM input with uniform and probabilistically shaped PMFs. The shaped constellations use the Maxwell
Boltzmann distribution in (60) with optimized ν for the SNR values corresponding to R 5 0.75 (6 b/sym) for both 64QAM and 256QAM. The probabilistically shaped constellations gain up 0.8 dB for 64QAM at 4 b/sym and 1.1 dB for 256QAM at 6 b/sym. Significant SNR gains compared to uniformly distributed QAM constellations can also be observed throughout the entire medium/ high rate region. In can also be noticed that using probabilistic shaping closes almost entirely the gap to capacity up to R  0.75. Probabilistic shaping is thus a near optimum approach for the design of CM schemes. Unfortunately, the IR illustrated in Fig. 9.10 only represents an upper bound on the performance of CM systems employing probabilistic shaping. Low complexity CM implementations closely approaching the performance gains predicted in Fig. 9.10 are still an open research topic [105,118,119]. 9.4.3.2 Geometrical shaping In the previous section, it was shown how modifying the probability of occurrence of each symbol in a given transmitted constellation can lead simultaneously to SNR savings and increase in MI for a fixed SNR. This section instead focuses on the design of

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

the geometry of a constellation where all symbols are assumed to be equally likely. This approach is referred to as geometrical shaping. Similarly to probabilistic shaping, geometrical shaping can improve the transmission performance and it can closely approach Shannon channel capacity when coupled with strong FEC schemes. For the AWGN channel, probabilistic shaping can reach an SNR gain that is achievable through geometrical shaping only when the latter is applied over a sufficiently large number of signal dimensions [77,89,103]. This maximum shaping gain is given by 1.53 dB and it corresponds to the shaping gain achieved by carving constellation points out of an N -dimensional lattice via an N -dimensional hypersphere. Such an N -dimensional constellation induces a constituent 2D constellation which is Gaussian distributed [103]. Thus, using probabilistic shaping in 2D is equivalent in terms of shaping gain to geometrical shaping for an asymptotically high number of dimensions. However, although probabilistic shaping might appear as a 2D shortcut to achieving optimal shaping gains, the geometrical shaping approach leads in general to simpler implementations of the CM scheme. In particular, the advantage of using geometrical shaping as opposed to probabilistic shaping lies in the fact that geometrical shaping is typically easier to interface to powerful off-the-shelf FEC schemes. This can be done, for instance, via simple memoryless bit-to-symbol mapping, thus allowing the FEC and the signal modulation blocks to remain decoupled, which enables a much deeper design flexibility. Another reason for exploring geometrical shaping in the optical fiber channel is given by the strong impact of the constellation geometry on the fiber nonlinear effects [27,31]. Different constellation geometries result in different higher order statistical moments of the constellation (such as the constellation kurtosis and 6th-order moment), which in turn play a significant role on the NLI generated through the fiber. The achievable IR of a shaped constellation in the optical fiber channel is then not only the result of the linear shaping gain previously discussed, but also of the increased nonlinearity tolerance of the shaped constellation [120,121]. In Fig. 9.11 the MI of three different constellations with cardinality M 5 64 are compared in terms of MI as function of the SNR in an AWGN channel: 64QAM (blue); a randomly shaped constellation (red); and a ring constellation (green). The results show that for low rates (below 3 bit/symbol (b/sym)) the three different formats have very similar performance. However, for rates in between 3 and 5 b/sym, the ring constellation achieves a gain of up to 0.57 dB (at 4.1 b/sym) and up to 0.17 b/sym over 64QAM. Conversely, at very high rates ($5.5 b/sym), 64QAM still outperforms the other two modulation formats. Surprisingly, it can be observed that the MI performance of 64QAM are comparable to a very irregular (randomly generated) modulation format for rates up to 4 b/sym. However, at higher rates, the gap becomes quite significant as the performance of the randomly generated constellation deteriorates.

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6 Capacity 5

MI [b/sym]

404

4 3

4.3

2

4.2

0.57 dB

4.1

1

4

0 −5

0.17 b/sym

0

5

12

10

12 .5

15

13

20

25

SNR [dB]

Figure 9.11 Mutual information (MI) versus signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for different geometrically shaped constellations in the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel.

9.4.4 Experimental investigation of high spectral efficiency coded modulation systems for optical communications In this section, experimental demonstrations of high SE CM schemes for fiber systems are presented, as reported in our previous works in Refs. [16,122]. 9.4.4.1 Nyquist wavelength-division multiplexing As the frequency spacing between optical carriers in a dense WDM system is reduced, interchannel interference begins to cause significant performance penalties due to linear crosstalk. Although tight filtering can be employed to constrain the BW of each WDM carrier, the filtering process itself results in significant intersymbol interference (ISI) within each channel. However, if an appropriate filter shape is used, for example, a sinc-shaped pulse with a corresponding rectangular spectrum, then the Nyquist criterion for ISI is met. In particular, the Nyquist criterion for zero ISI implies that the matched filtering output has a raised cosine spectral shape. This ensures that at the correct sampling instant, that is, where the pulse of interest reaches a maximum, the adjacent pulses reach a zero, thus avoiding ISI. A root-raised cosine (RRC) filter and a corresponding matched RRC filter at the receiver satisfy the Nyquist criterion and are selected to maximize BW use. Additionally, by decreasing the roll-off factor of the RRC filters, the WDM channel spacing can be reduced closer to the Nyquist frequency, without incurring significant penalties due to linear crosstalk (due to the signal power below the 3 dB BW). To mitigate the linear crosstalk induced penalties in a Nyquist-spaced system and maximize the SE requires the choice of optimum roll-off factors in the transmitter and receiver RRC filters, as a function of the WDM channel spacing.

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

DSP DAC Linear amps 1.5 kHz LPF LPF

ECL 1.1 kHz

OCG

Cascaded Odd IQ Mod de-interleavers Even IQ Mod

ASE

Pol Mux

ECL

High BW digital coherent receiver Sig LO

17 ns

LPF LPF RF synthesiser 10–11 GHz

Linear amps DAC DSP

Figure 9.12 Experimental setup for the seven subcarrier DP-256QAM superchannel transmission system. LPF, Low pass filter.

As an example, in Ref. [16], a 7 subcarrier superchannel was used to demonstrate the transmission performance of a high throughput optical communications system. However, as free running lasers typically vary in frequency relative to each another, it is difficult to experimentally investigate the performance penalty caused by the RC filter roll-off factor in isolation. To overcome this practical discrepancy, the performance of the digital RRC filter as a function of subcarrier spacing was verified using an optical comb source. As the comb lines are inherently frequency- and phase-matched, it was possible to isolate the performance degradation caused by the digital filtering process itself. Fig. 9.12 illustrates the schematic of a 7 3 10 GBd dual polarization (DP)16QAM system used to investigate the optimum filter characteristics and subcarrier spacing for our superchannel transmission system. The output of external cavity laser (ECL) with a linewidth of 1.1 kHz was passed through an optical comb generator that consisted of two cascaded Mach
Zehnder modulators, both overdriven with an amplified sinusoidal wave. This generated seven evenly spaced, frequency locked comb lines, with the channel spacing equal to the frequency of the applied sine wave. The frequency comb was separated into odd and even subcarriers using three cascaded micro-interferometer interleavers. Each set of comb lines were independently modulated using two in-phase/quadrature (IQ) modulators. Four decorrelated random binary sequences of length 216 were digitally generated offline and combined to provide two 4-level driving signals (required for the 16QAM format), which were spectrally shaped using a truncated RRC filter. The filter design was minimum order with a specified stop-band attenuation and roll-off factor. The roll-off factor ranged from 10% down to 0.1% and the number of filter taps increased from 320 for the 10% filter

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to B1000 for the lowest roll-off factor of 0.1%. There was also a corresponding decrease in stop-band attenuation from 40 dB down to 20 dB as the filter roll-off factor was reduced. The RRC filtered in-phase and quadrature signals were loaded onto a pair of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and output using two DACs, identically to that described in Section 9.4.3.2. The modulated odd and even channels were decorrelated by 170 symbols before being combined and polarization multiplexed to form a 7 3 10 GBd DP-16QAM signal. The back-to-back performance of the digital transmitter was initially verified using a single channel and is illustrated in Fig. 9.13A. The roll-off factor of the RRC filter was set to 0.1%, and an implementation penalty of 1.3 dB relative to the theoretical optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) limit was achieved at a BER of 1.5 3 1022. The

(A)

(B)

10 −1

Required OSNR (dB)

Theoretical OSNR limit experiment

10 −2 log10 (BER)

10

−3

10

−4

10 −5 11

13

15 17 19 OSNR (dB)

21

23

14.5 14

Theoretical OSNR limit experiment

13.5 13 12.5 12 −1 10

100 Roll-off factor(%)

101

(C) 18 Required OSNR (dB)

406

17 16 15

11 GHz 10.8 GHz 10.6 GHz 10.4 GHz 10.2 GHz 10.1 GHz 10.01 GHz

14 13 −1 10

100 Roll-off factor(%)

101

Figure 9.13 (A) Bit-error-rate (BER) as a function of received optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) [0.1 nm resolution bandwidth (BW)] for a single-channel with a roll-off factor of 0.1%. (B) Required OSNR to achieve a BER of 1.5 3 1022 as a function of the root raised cosine (RRC) filter roll-off factor for a single-channel system. (C) Required OSNR to achieve a BER of 1.5 3 1022 as a function of both the RRC filter roll-off factor and the channel spacing, for the central channel, in the 7-channel wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) system.

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

required OSNR to achieve a BER of 1.5 3 1022, as a function of the filter roll-off factor, was experimentally measured and is shown in Fig. 9.13B. The average OSNR was 13.5 dB as the roll-off factor increased from 0.1% to 10% and varied by 6 0.05 dB, which was within the measurement accuracy of our system. This demonstrates that there was no intrinsic penalty associated with the RRC filter characteristics and provides a baseline level of performance for the 10 GBd DP-16QAM digital transmitter. Fig. 9.13C shows the back-to-back performance for the DP-16QAM superchannel transmitter as a function of both the WDM channel spacing and RRC filter roll-off factor. An additional implementation penalty of 0.4 dB was measured at a channel spacing of 11 GHz and for a roll-off factor of 0.1%, which was due to the finite stop-band attenuation of the RRC digital filter in the transmitter. At this WDM channel spacing (11 GHz), the required OSNR (13.9 dB) to achieve a BER below 1.5 3 1022 was constant as a function of the RRC filter roll-off factor. This can be intuitively understood by considering the highest roll-off factor of 10%, which provides an optical BW that did not exceed 11 GHz; therefore, no linear crosstalk induced OSNR penalty was experienced at this spacing. However, as the channel spacing was reduced, there was a corresponding increase in the required OSNR to achieve a BER below 1.5 3 1022 for a RRC filter roll-off factor of 10%. This penalty was due to linear crosstalk between neighboring superchannel subcarriers and caused the required OSNR to gradually increase to 14.3 dB as the channel spacing approached 10.4 GHz. Below this spacing there was a sharp degradation in performance, thus requiring a reduction in the channel BW or decrease in the RRC filter roll-off factor. The OSNR penalty was found to reduce linearly as the RRC filter roll-off factor was decreased and an acceptable level of performance was achieved for a roll-off factor of 1% at any channel spacing greater than 10.1 GHz. However, in order to incur the minimum performance penalty due to linear crosstalk in a Nyquist-spaced (10 GHz) 10 GBd DP-16QAM WDM transmitter, while simultaneously achieving the highest information spectral density, the roll-off factor must be reduced to 0.1%. In the following experimental verifications, a subcarrier spacing of 10.2 GHz was chosen to allow for the low frequency drift of the free running lasers to be used in the MC-DBP demonstration. A RRC roll-off factor of 1% was therefore chosen to complement the subcarrier spacing of 10.2 GHz. 9.4.4.2 Higher order modulation formats for the optical fiber channel: experimental and numerical demonstration State-of-the-art commercial transmission links typically employ DP-QPSK and DP-16QAM modulations format, with some more advanced shorter links utilizing DP-64QAM. In this section, DP-mQAM formats are considered, where mA{4, 16, 64, 256} (can be higher order) and demonstrate that, for any received SNR, the highest throughput or capacity will always be achieved by using the highest order

407

EDFA

ASE Sig

MI, GMI and SD-FEC

IQ Mod

Digital coherent receiver

SNR estimation

ECL Pol Mux

y FO, CPE and GS

ECL 1.1 kHz

LPF

Filter taps

1.5 kHz LPF

Blind mQAM MMA

LO

Blind CMA pre-equalisation

Receiver

Resample and matched RRC filtering

Linear Amps

Sub-carrier down-conversion

(B)

DSP (x) FPGA DAC

de-Skew and normalisation

(A)

Polarisation diverse coherent receiver

Optical Fiber Telecommunications V11

Analogue-to-digital conversion

408

y

Figure 9.14 Single wavelength DP-mQAM transceiver: (A) experimental setup and (B) digital signal processing (DSP) functions within digital coherent receiver.

modulation format. This demonstration was initially performed in a single-channel, back-to-back experimental test-bed. The single optical transceiver experimental testbed used in this work is shown in Fig. 9.14A. The multilevel drive signals required for each mQAM format were generated by combining log2 m decorrelated random binary sequences of length 216. The coded bits were mapped to uniformly shaped QAM constellations using a memoryless mapper based on the binary reflected Gray code, which generated the transmitted symbols, x, as shown at the output of the mapper in Fig. 9.8B. The complex symbols were subsequently upsampled to 2 Sa/sym, which provided a symbol rate of 10 GBd as the DAC operated at 20 GSa/s. The complex signals were filtered using an RRC filter with a roll-off factor of 1% and a stopband attenuation in excess of 30 dB. The filtered mQAM signals were preemphasized to overcome the BW response of the electrical and optoelectronic components in the transmitter, before being quantized to 26 discrete levels, which corresponding to the 6 physical bits of resolution available within the DAC. Finally, the in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) components were loaded onto an FPGA and output using the DAC. Each electrical signal was amplified using a linear electrical amplifier and passed through an 8th-order Bessel low pass filter (LPF) with a rejection ratio in excess of 20 dB/GHz and a 3 dB BW of 6.2 GHz, before being applied to an IQ modulator. The output of an external cavity ECL with a 1.1 kHz linewidth was passed directly into the modulator before being optically amplified and polarizations multiplexed to form an 10 GBd Nyquist shaped DP-mQAM optical carrier. The DP-mQAM signal was passed directly into the signal port of the digital coherent receiver, which had a sampling rate of 160 GSa/s and an analog electrical BW of 62.5 GHz. The ASE noise was added to the signal to vary the received SNR and a second ECL (1.5 kHz linewidth) was used as a LO. The key blocks of the blind DSP implementation, including the SNR and MI estimation, are illustrated in Fig. 9.14B. The received signals (sampled at 160 GS/s) were initially corrected for receiver skew imbalance and normalized to overcome the

High-order modulation formats, constellation design, and digital signal processing

varying responsivities of the 70 GHz balanced photodiodes within the coherent receiver. Each polarization was resampled to 2 Sa/sym before matched RRC filtering. A blind 51-tap multimodulus algorithm (MMA) equalizer [123] was used to equalize the signal and to undo polarizations rotations, with the CMA equalizer [124] used for tap-weight preconvergence. The symbols at the output of the equalizer were decimated to 1 Sa/sym and the intermediate frequency was estimated and removed using a 4th-order nonlinearity algorithm [125]. The carrier phase was estimated per polarizations using a decision directed phase estimation algorithm and the complex field was averaged over a 64 T-spaced sliding window to improve the estimate [126]. Gram
Schmidt orthogonalization [127] was performed in order to correct for suboptimal phase bias in the transmitter IQ modulators, which occurred over time due to temperature variations. The symbols at the output of the Gram
Schmidt orthogonalization stage represented the received symbols, y, as shown in Fig. 9.8B, and were used to calculate the SNR and MI. The SNR (γ) was ideally estimated as: γ 5 E½jxj2 =σ2z , where E½jxj2  is the average received symbol energy and σ2z is the noise variance. The MI was calculated over both polarizations as a function of the estimated SNR for 4QAM, 16QAM, 64QAM, and 256QAM, respectively and is shown in Fig. 9.15A. The experimental measurement was recorded by adding ASE noise to the signal and measuring the MI for 20 discrete values of SNR ranging from 0 to 26 dB (depending on the order of the format). The Shannon capacity of the AWGN channel is also shown to provide a performance reference for the experimental results. For DP-4QAM (QPSK), the MI increased from 1.95 b/sym at a received SNR of 0 dB, to 3.17 b/sym at an SNR of 4 dB, and finally to a maximum MI of 4 b/sym (2 b/sym

16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0

(B) Capacity DP-4QAM DP-16QAM DP-64QAM DP-256QAM

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20 22 24 SNR [dB]

SNR [dB]

MI [b/sym]

(A)

40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0

SNR DP-4QAM DP-16QAM DP-64QAM DP-256QAM

0

4

8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 OSNR [dB]

Figure 9.15 (A) Experimentally measured MI as a function of received SNR. (A) MI (measured over two polarizations) for DP-4QAM (DP-QPSK), DP-16QAM, DP-64QAM and DP-256QAM. The dotted line illustrates the Shannon capacity of an AWGN channel. (B) Corresponding received OSNR as a function, where Fb is the symbol rate and N0 is the reference noise BW corresponding to 0.1 nm.

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for 4QAM over two polarizations) at an SNR of 12 dB. The maximum SNR obtained for the DP-4QAM format was 26 dB and this remained constant even as the power of the power of the ASE noise loading stage was reduced toward zero. This is clear from Fig. 9.15B, which shows the received OSNR as a function of the measured SNR. The main contributions to the limited SNR within the digital coherent transceiver were the DAC and linear electrical amplifiers in the transmitter and the analogto-digital converters (ADCs) in the real-time sampling oscilloscope at the receiver. The DAC used in this work exhibited a physical resolution of 6 bits. However, the measured ENOB of the DAC was B5 bits over the frequency range from 0 to 5 GHz (BW of the spectrally shaped IQ drive signals), which corresponds to an SNR of B32 dB. The linear amplifiers had a noise figure of 6 dB at a frequency of 5 GHz; therefore, the maximum attainable SNR from the electrical components within the transmitter was B26 dB. The ADCs in the real-time sampling oscilloscope also exhibited a frequency-dependent ENOB, which was 4.8 bits at a frequency of 4 GHz (reduced to 4.3 bits at a frequency of 60 GHz). Similar MI performance was achieved for the DP-16QAM format, which exhibited a MI of 1.98 b/sym at an SNR of 0 dB and reached a maximum of 8 b/sym at an SNR of 19.5 dB. The maximum SNR for The DP-64QAM format realized the maximum MI of 12 b/sym at an SNR of 24 dB. The upper limit on the SNR that could be practically achieved using this transceiver setup was lower for the DP64QAM format than that of the DP-4QAM format. The reduction in SNR of B2 dB was caused by the blind DSP implementation. As the order of QAM is increased, blind decisions made in the DSP are more likely to be incorrect as the order of the format is increased. This is exasperated for the DP-256QAM format, which never achieved the maximum possible MI of 16 b/sym. The MI for the DP-256QAM format was limited to 13.7 b/sym due to both the saturation in the SNR within the coherent optical transceiver and an additional penalty arising from the blind DSP implementation. Therefore, as the power of the ASE noise loading stage was reduced towards zero, the SNR remained constant at 22 dB. The MI curves shown in Fig. 9.15A never intersect. Therefore, in a transceiver-limited CM optical communication system, the largest constellation size will always provide the greatest achievable IR and thus the highest throughput. It is important to note that the finite SNR of a coherent optical transceiver is an inherent property that cannot be mitigated or compensated and currently represents a significant obstacle to increasing the throughput of light wave communications systems. However, if practical improvements are made to the transceiver subsystems, greater IRs could be achieved. Currently, high resolution ADCs and DACs that are capable of achieving an SNR in excess of 50 dB are commercially available, albeit at lower sampling rates of approximately 3 GSample/s (GSa/s). However, the availability of these components will become commonplace at higher sampling rates in the near future.

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9.4.4.3 Numerical investigation of shaped DP-64QAM and DP-256QAM in the optical fiber channel To demonstrate the performance of the probabilistic shaping, numerical simulations using DP-64QAM and DP-256QAM were performed. Single-channel simulations were carried out in a back-to-back (B2B) system configuration using similar physical configurations as described in Section 9.4.3.2 and compared to uniform QAM. For a given SNR, QAM symbols (x), as shown at the output of the mapper in Fig. 9.8B were generated based on Eq. (9.60). The signal was then upsampled to 2 sample/ symbol (Sa/sym) and filtered with an RRC filter with a roll-off factor of 1%, generating a signal at 12.5 GBd. Additionally the signal was filtered by a 5th-order Bessel filter to emulate limited electronic BW conditions. The signal was then noise loaded to desired SNR and detected with a coherent receiver introducing a 200 MHz frequency offset and 5 kHz linewidth. The DSP blocks used to process the signal are the same used in Section 9.4.3.2, illustrated in in Fig. 9.14B. A matched RRC was applied before 11-taps MMA equalizer [123], preconverged with CMA equalizer [124]. Frequency offset is then compensated using a 4th-order nonlinearity and carrier phase is estimated using a decision directed algorithm with an averaging window of 64 T-spaced samples. The blind algorithms for equalization and CPE rely on regular structure of the uniform QAM constellation to recover the signal; however, for low SNRs, due to the markedly uneven probabilities of the shaped constellation do not perform as reliably (Fig. 9.16 insets). Therefore, for the results presented in this

16 15 14

Capacity DP-64QAM DP-64QAM shaped DP-256QAM DP-256QAM shaped

MI [b/sym]

13 1.1 dB

12 11 10

0.8 dB

9 8 7 6 10

12

14

16 18 SNR [dB]

20

22

24

Figure 9.16 Simulation measured mutual information (MI) as a function of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for dual-polarizations 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-64QAM) and dualpolarizations 256-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-256QAM) with and without shaping, with data-aided (DA) digital signal processing (DSP). The dotted line illustrates the Shannon capacity of an additive white GN channel.

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section, both the equalizer and the phase estimator are data-aided, similar to previous investigation of probabilistic shaped signal [107]. Although for the uniform QAM data-aided DSP was not required, it was used for fair comparison. Additionally, training aided and blind algorithms that handle shaped constellations at no additional penalty are currently under investigation. At the output of the phase estimator the symbols y are used to calculate the MI. Fig. 9.16 shows the performance when filtering, frequency offset, and phase noise are taken into consideration, with the data-aided DSP discussed above. The maximum SNR gains due to probabilistic shaping are 0.8 dB for DP-64QAM and 1.1 dB for DP-256QAM. A comparison with the theoretical results showed in Section 9.4.3.1 for the AWGN channel demonstrate that no SNR penalty was incurred due to the optical transceiver impairments.

9.5 Conclusions Optical fiber nonlinearities have been seen as the major bottleneck to the achievable IR of optical transmission networks. The signal degradations due to the nonlinear distortions limit the achievable transmission distances and become more significant in systems with larger transmission BWs, closer channel spacing, and higher order modulation formats. This chapter discussed a series of techniques developed to overcome the capacity barriers in optical fiber communication systems. The key goal was to describe the DSP-based nonlinearity compensation and quantify possible increases in the achievable capacity and transmission distances, depending on the modulation format used, that come from the combination of nonlinearity compensation and signal constellation shaping. This rapidly changing field has seen tremendous progress, and it remains to be seen whether the significant point-to-point system gains, successfully achieved with the described techniques, can be extended to network-wide regime. Much hard work remains in applying them to transform the optical networks for the cloud to become more intelligent and adaptive, to be able to tailor network topology, capacity and delay to the rapidly changing, and ever increasing, array of applications.

Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to many colleagues and support in the UK EPSRC Program Grants TRANSNET (EP/R035342/1) and UNLOC (EP/J017582/1) as well as EU Horizon 2020 RISE Grant DAWN4IoE (778305) and the EU ERC Grant (757791) for numerous contributions to the work described. The authors would like to thank Dr Domaniç Lavery and Professor Robert I. Killey (UCL) for suggestions to improve this chapter.

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