Optical switching of Nyquist superchannel with flexible bit rate

Abstract

In this paper, we review optical switching experiments of Nyquist superchannel with flexible bit rate. The various switching data capacities of 40,100 and 400-Gb/s are achieved by employing adaptive multi-level or hybrid quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats. We aggregate superchannels with enough guard bands for optical superchannel switching with slight error vector magnitude (EVM) penalty. We also demonstrate Terabit optical switching functionality of polarization division multiplexed (PDM) 64-QAM signals with Nyquist pulse shaping.