Ciena Corporation
Probabilistic constellation shaping of multi-dimensional symbols for improved tolerance to nonlinear impairments

Abstract:

An optical transmitter device includes a digital signal processor (DSP) having digital hardware. The DSP is operative to generate shaped bits from a first set of information bits, and to apply a systematic forward error correction (FEC) scheme to encode the shaped bits and a second set of information bits, where the first set of information bits and the second set of information bits are disjoint sets. Unshaped bits and the shaped bits are mapped to selected symbols or are used to select symbols from one or more constellations. The selected symbols are mapped to physical dimensions. Each unshaped bit is either one of the second set of information bits or one of multiple parity bits resulting from the FEC encoding. In this manner, a target spectral efficiency is achieved.