September 10, 2010 / Vol. 8, No. 9 / CHINESE OPTICS LETTERS 831
100-Gb/s undersea transmission with high spectral
efficiency using pre-filtered QPSK modulation format
(Invited Paper)
J.-X. Cai
∗
, Y. Cai, C. R. Davidson, D. G. Foursa, A. Lucero, O. Sinkin, W. Patterson, A. Pilipetskii,
G. Mohs, and Neal S. Bergano
Tyco Electronics Subsea Communications LLC (“TE SubCom” formerly known as Tyco Telecommunications (US) Inc.),
250 Industrial Way West, Eatontown, NJ 07724, USA
∗
E-mail: jcai@subcom.com
Received June 12, 2010
We provide a review of our recent 100-Gb/s, high spectral efficiency (SE) experiment targeting transoceanic
and regional undersea transmission distances. We demonstrated that simple pre-filtering at the transmitter
together with a maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) detection algorithm can significantly impro ve
SE. We transmitted 96×100-Gb/s pre-filtered polarization division multiplexed return-to-zero quadrature
phase shift keyed (PDM-RZ-QPSK) channels with 300% SE over 10608 km using 52-km spans of 150-µm
2
fiber and simple single-stage erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs). We also achiev ed 400% SE over
4368 km using similar techniques.
OCIS codes: 060.2330, 060.1660, 060.4510.
doi: 10.3788/COL20100809.0831.
1. Introduction
High spectral efficiency (SE), a desirable metric in all
optical communications systems, is particularly challeng-
ing for transoceanic cable systems. The new paradigm of
digital coherent receivers has enabled several impressive
demonstrations. In 2009, we have seen transoceanic
transmission demonstrations with 200% SE using
the single-carrier polarization division multiplexing-
quadrature phase shift keying (PDM-QPSK) modula-
tion format
[1,2]
or the two-carrier PDM-QPSK modula-
tion format
[3]
. Further SE enhancement (∼360%) was
demonstrated with more elaborate PDM/orthogonal fre-
quency division multiplexing (OFDM) techniques
[4]
.For
all the aforementioned demonstrations, either Raman
assisted erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) or pure
Raman amplification was used to boost the received
optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) for the 100-Gb/s
signals.
In our work, we transmitted 96×112-Gb/s pre-filtered
PDM-RZ-QPSK (RZ: return-to-zero) channels over a
10608 km path constructed with an amplifier chain con-
sisting of single-stage EDFAs and 150-µm
2
large effective
area fiber
[5]
. The 300% SE was achieved with >10 dB Q-
factor for all 96 channels. In addition, we achieved 400%
SE over 4368 km also using pre-filtered PDM-RZ-QPSK.
Both results were accomplished without differential de-
coding. The aggressive pre-filtering required for both
demonstrations created significant back-to-back inter-
symbol-interference (ISI) penalty which produces a more
complex signal constellation and can also be interpreted
as memory in the modulation format. We have de-
veloped a suite of algorithms to take advantage of the
“memory” produced by pre-filtering to mitigate the lin-
ear ISI penalty associated with the tight filtering. We
showed that > 400% SE is achievable using PDM-QPSK
transmission.
2. Experimental setup
Figure 1 shows a schematic of our transmitter setup.
We electrically generate four binary 28-Gb/s signals (I,
IandQ,Q with pseudo-random bit sequence (PRBS)
length 2
23
–1) by multiplexing 14-Gb/s data streams from
a four-channel pulse pattern generator (PPG). The 28-
Gb/s streams are used in pairs for the in-phase (I) and
quadrature (Q) ports of two QPSK modulators to gener-
ate two optical QPSK signals at 28 Gbaud or equivalently
56 Gb/s. After RZ pulse carving, each of the two opti-
cal signals is then split into two equal paths. One path
is delayed with respect to the other to de-correlate the
data patterns. The two data paths are then orthogonally
recombined using a polarization beam combiner (PBC),
resulting in two 112-Gb/s PDM-RZ-QPSK signals.
Each of the two QPSK modulators imparts its data
onto a comb of wavelengths to generate two rails of odd
and even channels. The two rails are pre-filtered and
combined with cascaded 33-GHz or cascaded 25-GHz
optical interleaving filters for 300% or 400% SE, re-
spectively. Each rail consists of 48 distributed feedback
(DFB) lasers and 4 tunable external cavity lasers (ECLs)
with 1-pm resolution. The eight ECLs are tuned to a
contiguous set of channels and the corresponding DFB
lasers are disabled for the bit error measurements. This
process is repeated and the ECLs are tuned across the
band until all 96 channels are measured. All 96 chan-
nels are modulated in a similar fashion at all times. We
also experimentally confirmed that a de-correlated 4-rail
transmitter setup performed very similar to the 2-rail
setup shown in Fig. 1 for 25-GHz channel spacing.
The 624-km circulating loop test-bed (Fig. 2) consists
of twelve 52-km spans using a large effective area fiber
with A
eff
≈ 150 µm
2
, mid-band chromatic dispersion ≈
20.6 ps/(nm·km), and attenuation ≈ 0.183 dB/km. Each
1671-7694/2010/090831-06
c
2010 Chinese Optics Letters