Quadrature Duobinary for High-Spectral Efficiency 100G Transmission

This paper proposes and analyzes a quadrature duobinary modulation format with coherent detection for high-spectral efficiency wavelength-division-multiplexing transmission systems at 112 Gb/s per channel. A practical system design of a dual polarization quadrature duobinary (DP-QDB) format with coherent heterodyne detection is analyzed and compared with the DP-differential quadrature phase-shift keying format for feasibility of 112 Gb/s transmission. Using simulation analysis, we show that the relatively narrow spectrum of quadrature duobinary modulation provides an effective practical means for realizing high-spectral efficiency transmission, approaching the theoretical limit of 4 bits/s/Hz, while also providing excellent tolerance to optical filter cascades for a robust optical networking functionality.