Joint constellation shaping optical modulation scheme based on a pair of common-bottomed trigonal cones.

Abstract

A joint constellation shaping (JCS) three-dimensional (3D) 16-ary modulation scheme constructed with a pair of common-bottomed trigonal cones (CBTC) as primitives is proposed. Compared to the 3D traditional constellation (TC) and the 3D geometric constellation shaping (GS) structure previously proposed by our group (GGS), the constellation figure of merit (CFM) is improved by 0.3906 and 0.0097, respectively. Meanwhile, probabilistic shaping (PS) is employed to optimize the 3D-CBTC-16CAP constellation structure for the second time to enhance the CFM of the constellation further. Compared to the 3D-CBTC-16CAP, after PS the 3D-JCS-16CAP has a CFM improvement of 0.5014. Experiments are carried out to transmit the signals across a 2 km seven-core fiber. At the bit error rate (BER) threshold ∼3.8 × 10-3, the 3D-CBTC-16CAP scheme demonstrates an improvement in the receiver sensitivity by 0.76 and 0.39 dB compared with 3D-TC-16CAP and 3D-GGS-16CAP. In addition, the transmission effect of the signals after joint PS is verified. Experiments show that the proposed 3D-JCS-16CAP scheme has the most significant enhancement effect when used in conjunction with PS, and the receiver sensitivity is improved by about 0.97 and 0.34 dB compared with the 3D-JTC-16CAP (3D-TC-16CAP signal after joint PS) and 3D-JGGS-16CAP (3D-GGS-16CAP signal after the joint PS).