A Pragmatic Coded Modulation Scheme for High-Spectral-Efficiency Fiber-Optic Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a pragmatic coded modulation scheme for fiber-optic communications that achieves near-capacity spectral efficiency with low error floors, leveraging signal shaping and staircase codes.

Contribution

It presents a novel coded modulation system combining signal shaping and staircase codes, achieving high spectral efficiency close to capacity in long-distance fiber-optic links.

Findings

Achieves 0.62 bits/s/Hz spectral efficiency within capacity limits

Error floor below 1E-20 demonstrates high reliability

Digital backpropagation improves spectral efficiency by 0.55 to 0.75 bits/s/Hz

Abstract

A pragmatic coded modulation system is presented that incorporates signal shaping and exploits the excellent performance and efficient high-speed decoding architecture of staircase codes. Reliable communication within 0.62 bits/s/Hz of the estimated capacity (per polarization) of a system with L=2000 km is provided by the proposed system, with an error floor below 1E-20. Also, it is shown that digital backpropagation increases the achievable spectral efficiencies---relative to linear equalization---by 0.55 to 0.75 bits/s/Hz per polarization.