Spectrally Efficient 1-Tb/s Transceivers for Long-Haul Optical Systems

We report on the generation and the transmission of 1-Tb/s superchannels for long-haul optical systems. Based on a multicarrier approach, we optimize the design of coherent transceivers at 1-Tb/s while varying the modulation formats together with code rate of soft-decision forward error correction. Through long-haul transmission experiments, we validate our optimum design and highlight the tradeoff between spectral efficiency and maximum transmission reach for 1-Tb/s optical transport. We also report on the transmission impairments suffered by spectrally efficient 1-Tb/s superchannels under the constraints of legacy optical networks using test bed made of 100 km long spans of SSMF and standard 50-GHz slots WSS.