On Achievable Rates for Long-Haul Fiber-Optic Communications

Abstract

Lower bounds on mutual information (MI) of long-haul optical fiber systems for hard-decision and soft-decision decoding are studied. Ready-to-use expressions to calculate the MI are presented. Extensive numerical simulations are used to quantify how changes in the optical transmitter, receiver, and channel affect the achievable transmission rates of the system. Special emphasis is put to the use of different quadrature amplitude modulation formats, channel spacings, digital back-propagation schemes and probabilistic shaping. The advantages of using MI over the prevailing $Q$-factor as a figure of merit of coded optical systems are also highlighted.

Hard decision mutual information analysis added, two typos corrected

Cited by in corpus (4)

• On Probabilistic Shaping of Quadrature Amplitude Modulation for the Nonlinear Fiber Channel
• SDM Optical Systems with MMSE Equalizers: Information Rates and Performance Monitoring
• Simple Closed-Form Approximations for Achievable Information Rates of Coded Modulation Systems
• Frequency Logarithmic Perturbation on the Group-Velocity Dispersion Parameter with Applications to Passive Optical Networks