PDM-16QAM transmission performance over uncompensated fiber links

Abstract

The dependence of propagation performance on the signal baud-rate is investigated by simulations for WDM PDM-16QAM systems operating at a spectral efficiency of 4 b/s/Hz. We take into account the case of transmission over uncompensated links, both for standard single-mode fiber and non-zero dispersion-shifted fiber. Three baud-rates are tested: 16.25, 32.5 and 65 Gbaud, including overhead for soft-decision FEC. Hence, we compare the performance limited by the nonlinear impairments in case of 100, 200 and 400 Gb/s data rate transmission, respectively. We demonstrate that the trade-off between higher OSNR margin and nonlinear transmission penalty favors transmission at lower baud-rate (16.25 Gbaud) and narrower channel spacing (25 GHz), among the three different simulated baud-rates.

Routing, Modulation Format, Baud Rate and Spectrum Allocation in Optical Metro Rings With Flexible Grid and Few-Mode Transmission

“…The intermodal crosstalk induced during the propagation is the main impairment limiting the maximum reach. In fact, we consider only uncompensated links, where the impact of nonlinearities becomes significant only for long-distance transmission [38]. Hence, in our analysis addressed to metro networks, we do not take into account the impact of nonlinearities.…”