An optical gateway to convert four-level pulse amplitude modulation to quadrature phase shift keying modulation format having shaping gain was proposed for flexible intensity to phase mapping which exploits non-uniform phase noise. The power consumption of the optical modulation format conversion can save by making a DNN-based decision on the receiver side for the generated QPSK signal with non-uniform phase noise. A proof-of-principle experiment has shown that an optically geometric constellation shaped QPSK modulated signals generated from regular PAM4 signals with Gaussian-distributed noise. The shaped QPSK signal shows BER and generalized mutual information improvement by 1dB gain through the use of digital neural network signal recovery.
Recently, data-driven approaches motivated by modern deep learning have been applied to optical communications in place of traditional model-based counterparts. The application of deep neural networks (DNN) allows flexible statistical analysis of complicated fiber-optic systems without relying on any specific physical models. Due to the inherent nonlinearity in DNN, various equalizers based on DNN have shown significant potentials to mitigate fiber nonlinearity. In this paper, we propose a turbo equalization (TEQ) based on DNN as a new alternative framework to deal with nonlinear fiber impairments for future coherent optical communications. The proposed DNN-TEQ is constructed with nested deep residual networks (ResNet) to train extrinsic likelihood given soft-information feedback from channel decoding. Through extrinsic information transfer (EXIT) analysis, we verify that our DNN-TEQ can accelerate decoding convergence to achieve a significant gain in achievable throughput by 0.61b/s/Hz. We also demonstrate that optimizing irregular low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes to match EXIT chart of the DNN-TEQ can improve achievable rates by up to 0.12 b/s/Hz.