Achievable Rates of Space-Division Multiplexed Submarine Links Subject to Nonlinearities and Power Feed Constraints

Abstract

We study the achievable rates of submarine fiber systems in the high-dimensional design space of variables including span length, launch power, number of spatial channels, and power feed current. We identify the regimes in which nonlinearities or power feed equipment constraints become dominant, and demonstrate that optimized system design evolves toward the linear regime as the system scales to a high number of spatial channels. We calculate the bit rate achievable by uniform and probabilistically shaped M-ary Quadrature Amplitude Modulation constellations to identify potential capacity-achieving implementations.