$3\times 2 ^{N}$-QAM Constellation Formats for DMT Over 1-mm Core Diameter Plastic Optical Fiber

Abstract

The family of 3 × 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</sup> quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations in combination with discrete multitone modulation is employed to maximize the throughput of 1-mm core diameter plastic optical fibers. Using this scheme together with a bit and power loading algorithm, a bit-rate improvement of 12% is achieved compared with using only 2 <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">N</i> -QAM scheme. A bit rate of 5.6 Gb/s is demonstrated over 50 m of 1-mm core diameter graded-index plastic optical fiber (POF).