Data Transmission based on Exact Inverse Periodic Nonlinear Fourier Transform, Part II: Waveform Design and Experiment

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates an experimental optical fiber communication scheme using the periodic nonlinear Fourier transform, encoding information in the main spectrum, achieving long-distance transmission with low error rates.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method for waveform design using the exact inverse PNFT and validates it through experiments, extending the understanding of nonlinear Fourier-based transmission.

Findings

Achieved 2000 km transmission with a bit-error ratio of 10^{-3}

Demonstrated the feasibility of PNFT-based encoding in optical fibers

Found that solitonic components extend transmission reach beyond naive estimates

Abstract

The nonlinear Fourier transform has the potential to overcome limits on performance and achievable data rates which arise in modern optical fiber communication systems when nonlinear interference is treated as noise. The periodic nonlinear Fourier transform (PNFT) has been much less investigated compared to its counterpart based on vanishing boundary conditions. In this paper, we design a first experiment based on the PNFT in which information is encoded in the invariant nonlinear main spectrum. To this end, we propose a method to construct a set of periodic waveforms each having the same fixed period, by employing the exact inverse PNFT algorithm developed in Part I. We demonstrate feasibility of the transmission scheme in experiment in good agreement with simulations and obtain a bit-error ratio of $10^{-3}$ over a distance of 2000 km. It is shown that the transmission reach is significantly longer than expected from a naive estimate based on group velocity dispersion and cyclic prefix length, which is explained through a dominating solitonic component in the transmitted waveform. Our constellation design can be generalized to an arbitrary number of nonlinear degrees of freedom.