Performance Comparison Between 4D Trellis Coded Modulation and PAM-4 for Low-Cost 400 Gbps WDM Optical Networks

Abstract

We investigate two trellis-coded modulation (TCM) schemes for use in next-generation low-cost 400G optical networks. Their performance is evaluated against that of four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4). We experimentally demonstrate that TCM outperforms PAM-4 at bit rates between 56 and 80 Gbps and thus is a valid candidate for 8λ × 50G implementations of future 400G wave division multiplexing (WDM) networks. Due to the severe bandwidth limitations of the experimental setup, the feed-forward equalizer and the maximum likelihood sequence estimation equalizer are employed in order to achieve bit error rates below the KP4 threshold of 3 × 10 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">-4</sup> . We also show that, at 56 Gbps and 1300 nm wavelength, TCM enables optical links of up to 40 km, whereas PAM-4 can only provide transmissions of up to 30 km. We observe that TCM performance degrades faster than that of PAM-4 when we increase the bit rate. For rates higher than 80 Gbps, TCM is not able to improve upon PAM-4 anymore. Thus, only PAM-4 is fit for 4λ × 100G WDM networks, unless higher bandwidth components are used.