Nonlinear Tolerant Spectrally-Efficient Transmission Using PDM 64-QAM Single Carrier FDM With Digital Pilot-Tone

We propose nonlinear tolerant single carrier frequency-division-multiplexing (SC-FDM) signal enhanced by digital pilot-tone for future high speed Ethernet transport like 400 G Ethernet. First, we discuss system configuration and the wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) transmission of SC-FDM signals employing polarization-division-multiplexed (PDM) 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (64-QAM). Next, we describe the long-haul transmission characteristics of 50 GHz-spaced 538 Gb/s × 7 ch WDM signals. We compare digital back-propagation (DBP) and digital pilot-tone for nonlinearity compensation and experimentally show that digital pilot-tone can effectively compensate the phase noise induced by inter-channel nonlinear effects with less computational complexity than DBP. Then we discuss a high-capacity transmission experiment employing 548 Gb/s PDM-64QAM SC-FDM; 102.3 Tb/s (224 × 548 Gb/s) C- and extended L-band WDM transmission is demonstrated over 240 km (3 × 80 km) of pure-silica-core fiber (PSCF) with all-Raman amplification. Thanks to the high nonlinear tolerance enhanced by pilot-tone, we can employ the 80 km repeater spacing used in conventional terrestrial systems. Assuming 20% forward error correction (FEC) overhead, a spectral efficiency of 9.1 b/s/Hz is achieved.