On Optimum Enumerative Sphere Shaping Blocklength at Different Symbol Rates for the Nonlinear Fiber Channel

We show that a 0.9 dB SNR improvement can be obtained via short-blocklength enumerative sphere shaping for single-span transmission at 56 GBd. This gain vanishes for higher symbol rates and a larger number of spans.

Introducing 4D Geometric Shell Shaping

Four dimensional geometric shell shaping (4D-GSS) is introduced and evaluated for reach increase and nonlinearity tolerance in terms of achievable information rates and post-FEC bit-error rate. A format is designed with a spectral efficiency of 8 bit/4D-sym and is compared against polarization-multiplexed 16QAM (PM-16QAM) and probabilistically shaped PM-16QAM (PS-PM-16QAM) in a 400ZR-compatible transmission setup with high amount of nonlinearities. Numerical simulations for a single-span, single-channel show that 4D-GSS achieves increased nonlinear tolerance and reach increase against PM-16QAM and PS-PM-16QAM when optimized for bit-metric decoding (RBMD). In terms of RBMD, gains are small with a reach increase of 1.6% compared to PM-16QAM. When optimizing for mutual information, a larger reach increase of 3% is achieved compared to PM-16QAM. Moreover, the introduced GSS scheme provides a scalable framework for designing well-structured 4D modulation formats with low complexity.

4D Geometric Shell Shaping with Applications to 400ZR

Geometric shell shaping is introduced and evaluated for reach increase and nonlinearity tolerance in terms of MI against PM-16QAM and PS-PM-16QAM in a 400ZR compatible transmission setup.

Mitigating Nonlinear Interference by Limiting Energy Variations in Sphere Shaping

Band-trellis enumerative sphere shaping is proposed to decrease the energy variations in channel input sequences. Against sphere shaping, 0.74 dB SNR gain and up to 9% increase in data rates are demonstrated for single-span systems.

High-Cardinality Hybrid Shaping for 4D Modulation Formats in Optical Communications Optimized via End-to-End Learning

In this paper we carry out a joint optimization of probabilistic (PS) and geometric shaping (GS) for four-dimensional (4D) modulation formats in long-haul coherent wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) optical fiber communications using an auto-encoder framework. We propose a 4D 10 bits/symbol constellation which we obtained via end-to-end deep learning over the split-step Fourier model of the fiber channel. The constellation achieved 13.6% reach increase at a data rate of approximately 400 Gbits/second in comparison to the ubiquitously employed polarization multiplexed 32-QAM format at a forward error correction overhead of 20%.

On Kurtosis-limited Enumerative Sphere Shaping for Reach Increase in Single-span Systems

The effect of decreasing the kurtosis of channel inputs is investigated for the first time with an algorithmic shaping implementation. No significant gains in decoding performance are observed for multi-span systems, while an increase in reach is obtained for single-span transmission.

Kurtosis-limited Sphere Shaping for Nonlinear Interference Noise Reduction in Optical Channels

Nonlinear interference (NLI) generated during the propagation of an optical waveform through the fiber depends on the fourth order standardized moment of the channel input distribution, also known as kurtosis. Probabilistically-shaped inputs optimized for the linear Gaussian channel have a Gaussian-like distribution with high kurtosis. For optical channels, this leads to an increase in NLI power and consequently, a decrease in effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this work, we propose kurtosis-limited enumerative sphere shaping (K-ESS) as an algorithm to generate low-kurtosis shaped inputs. Numerical simulations demonstrate that with K-ESS, it is possible to increase the effective SNRs by 0.4 dB in a single-span single-channel scenario at 400 Gbit/s. K-ESS offers also a twofold decrease in frame error rate with respect to Gaussian-channel-optimal sphere shaping.