# Probabilistically-Shaped Coded Modulation with Hard Decision Decoding for Coherent Optical Systems

## TL;DR

This paper explores probabilistic shaping combined with hard decision decoding to enhance the information rate in coherent optical systems, demonstrating significant performance improvements over traditional uniform modulation schemes.

## Contribution

It introduces a probabilistic shaping scheme with binary staircase codes that outperforms uniform coded modulation in optical communication systems.

## Key findings

- Over 1.3 dB gain for 64-QAM with probabilistic shaping
- Significant improvement over uniform modulation schemes
- Effective use of hard decision decoding in optical systems

## Abstract

We consider probabilistic shaping to maximize the achievable information rate of coded modulation (CM) with hard decision decoding. The proposed scheme using binary staircase codes outperforms its uniform CM counterpart by more than 1.3 dB for 64-QAM and 5 bits/symbol.