Enabling High Capacity WDM Transmission Systems for Data Centre and Access Networking Applications

Abstract

Increased capacity in data centre (DC) and passive optical networks (PONs) can be achieved by a transition to intensity modulation with direct detection (IM/DD) modulation formats such as PAM. However, the power budget in both DC and PON systems becomes more challenging as the baud rate and modulation format increase, motivating the use of integrated semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOA) in these systems. This work outlines the use of probabilistic shaping to trade off noise and nonlinearity in the systems to optimise the performance of optically amplified data centre and access networks.