One Tbps superchannel generated by Optical Flat Comb Source WDM-Nyquist and OFDM system simulative investigation

Abstract

In this paper, we implement an Optical Flat Comb Source generating a coherent super-channel operating at 1 Tbps using WDM-Nyquist and OFDM approaches with new flex-grid channel spacing. The new flex-grid defines WDM channel spacing having a multiple of 12.5 GHz. We compare through simulation the performance of two techniques for generating Dual Polarization-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation based on 16 (DP-16QAM), 64 (DP-64QAM) and 128 (DP-128QAM). We first study the performance of WDM-Nyquist and OFDM super-channels implementing DP- 16QAM, DP-64QAM and DP-128QAM in back-to-back scenarios in terms of receiver sensitivity and Optical Signal-to- Noise Ratio (OSNR) requirement with 12.5 GHz flex-grid spacing. We find that DP-16QAM has the best receiver sensitivity and the lower OSNR penalty compared to the other modulation formats in WDM-Nyquist system. With DP- 128QAM sensitivity as reference, we can observe a benefit of 10 dB for DP-16QAM with a BER equal to 3.8 10-3. In addition, we can observe a benefit of 12.4 dB in OSNR for DP-16QAM compared to DP-128QAM for a BER equal to 3.8 10-3. Also, we study the impact of the optical and electrical shaping filters. Finally, we investigate the performance of WDM-Nyquist and OFDM terabit system with 12.5 GHz flex-grid spacing over long-haul dispersion compensated links using Standard Single Mode Fiber (SSMF). We find that DP-16QAM is the suitable modulation format in dispersion compensated WDM-Nyquist systems using SSMF fiber. In addition, we prove that the use of Raman amplification improve the maximum reach of the super-channel by increasing the span distance between the amplifier module. Indeed, using the Raman amplification the maximum reach increase from 812 km to 955 km in a WDM-Nyquist system based on DP-16QAM with 12.5 GHz flex-grid spacing.