Field Trial of Real-Time 400GbE Superchannel Using Configurable Modulation Formats

Abstract

We report a successful field trial of real-time optical superchannel transport of 400Gb/s Ethernet client traffic over a 216-km flexible grid G.652 fiber link using 64GBaud flexible rate optical transponders. We demonstrated, for the first time, error free transport of 400 GbE client traffic over an ultra-efficient optical superchannel of $2\times 200 \text{G}$ using modulation formats DP–16QAM, DP–8QAM, and DP–QPSK. Error free performance of 400GbE ultra-efficient optical superchannel was achieved at different channel separations as narrow as 37.5 GHz for DP–16QAM, 39 GHz for DP–8QAM, and 50 GHz for DP–QPSK. We also successfully demonstrated non-contiguous 400GbE optical superchannel, where the optical sub-channels are in non-adjacent spectral slots across the whole ${C}$ -band (3.85 THz apart). Stable long term (overnight) error free optical performance and end-to-end 400 GbE full throughput were measured.