We review some currently discussed solutions for 400 Gbit/s inter-data center WDM transmission for up to 100 km. We focus on direct detected solutions, namely PAM4 and DMT, and present two WDM systems based on these formats.
We review three solutions for low-cost data center interconnects with a target reach of up to 80 km. Directly detected DMT, PAM-4 and multi-band CAP are promising modulation schemes, enabling 400 Gbit/s by combining eight channels of 56 Gbit/s.
Discrete multi-tone transmission (DMT) is a promising candidate for future 400G data center interconnects. Eight channels, each carrying 56 Gb/s of data can be combined in a 50-GHz channel grid to form a 400 Gb/s superchannel. For a fully loaded 96 channel DWDM system this leads to a total capacity of 4.8 Tb/s. To meet the requirements of the targeted application in terms of cost efficiency and low power consumption, it is important to keep the complexity for the digital signal processing as low as possible. For DMT, the complexity is mainly determined by the length of the fast Fourier transformation (FFT). Since data center interconnects only have to bridge a distance of typically 80 km, we here investigate among other parameters the influence of the FFT length among other parameters on the achievable performance for 56 Gb/s DMT only for this distance. Transmission is performed in C-band to enable DWDM and no optical dispersion compensation is applied. We consider double sideband (DSB) as well as vestigial sideband (VSB) DMT. It can be seen that an FFT length of 128 is sufficient to reach the required performance in terms of bit error ratio, however, a higher length can significantly improve the performance.
We demonstrate 32.5 Tbit/s 16QAM Nyquist WDM transmission over a total length of 227 km of SMF-28 without optical dispersion compensation. A number of 325 optical carriers are derived from a single laser and encoded with dual-polarization 16QAM data using sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses. As we use no guard bands, the carriers have a spacing of 12.5 GHz equal to the Nyquist bandwidth of the data. We achieve a high net spectral efficiency of 6.4 bit/s/Hz using a software-defined transmitter which generates the electrical modulator drive signals in real-time.
We report order-of-magnitude improvements in performance of field-deployable hollow-core fiber cables evidenced by a 38.4Tb/s (800Gb/s-x-48WDM-channels) 20.5km lab-trial using commercial terminal equipment and the demonstration of 1128km/126km reach in full-fill 400/800Gb/s WDM recirculating-loop experiments.
The performance of enumerative sphere shaping (ESS), constant composition distribution matching (CCDM), and uniform signalling are compared at the same forward error correction rate. ESS is shown to offer a reach increase of approximately 10% and 22% compared to CCDM and uniform signalling, respectively.