Submarine Transmission Systems Using Digital Nonlinearity Compensation and Adaptive-Rate Forward Error Correction

we report on a full C+L-band erbium-doped fiber amplified (EDFA) submarine transmission experiment of 178 wavelength division multiplexed channels of 49 GBd polarization multiplexed 16QAM signals, achieving 54.2 Tb/s after 6,600 km, with a record per-channel average bit-rate of 304.5 Gb/s. Two digital nonlinearity post-compensation algorithms, i.e., digital backpropagation, and time-domain perturbative nonlinearity compensation were alternatively applied to all channels and their respective benefits, in terms of throughput increase, reach increase and complexity were addressed. Multiple-rate spatially-coupled low density parity check forward error correction codes with a novel rate optimization algorithm were employed. The power consumption of the power feeding equipment of our EDFA-only amplification scheme was analyzed and compared with that of hybrid EDFA-Raman amplification.