On adaptive transponders for optical slot switched networks: Nyquist-QAM and CO-OFDM experimental comparison

We report two transponder configurations capable to recover microsecond-scale packets and to adapt to tight filtering constraints present in optical slot switched intra-datacenter networks. We propose low-overhead CO-OFDM and format-adaptive Nyquist pulse-shaped signaling and compare their performances. Up to 100 nodes are experimentally cascaded in order to assess performances of both approaches. CO-OFDM signaling shows 50Gbps higher average rate, 40% extended reach, and >4GHz extra detuning tolerance than the Nyquist counterpart.