Evaluation of transmission reach and information rates in nonlinear optical fiber communication systems

Abstract

Coherent optical fiber systems can achieve long-distance, large-capacity and high data-rate transmissions. The system performance of communication systems is generally evaluated with regard to the data capacity and the transmission reach. In this work, the performance of multi-channel (up to C-band) Nyquist-spaced coherent optical communication systems has been assessed in terms of achievable information rates, transmission distances and signal-to-noise ratios, considering different influencing factors, such as nonlinearity compensation, signal input power and modulation format. Numerical simulations and enhanced Gaussian noise (EGN) model have been carried out for different modulation formats including quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM), 64-QAM and 256-QAM. It is found that in C-band (151-channel) Nyquist-spaced systems, the achievable information rates at the transmission distance of 6000 km are 19.3 Tbit/s for dual-polarization QPSK (DP-QPSK), 30.9 Tbit/s for DP-16QAM, 32.0 Tbit/s for DP64QAM and 32.2 Tbit/s for DP-256QAM, respectively, when electronic dispersion compensation is applied only. Such achievable information rates can be increased up to 38.3 Tbit/s for DP-16QAM, 47.2 Tbit/s for DP-64QAM and 47.8 Tbit/s for DP-256QAM, respectively, when the nonlinearity compensation is employed.