Performance comparison of RZ pulse formats in PDM-16QAM high rates transmissions with optical pre-filtering

The digitally modulated signals spectral density depends directly on pulse format used for information symbols transmission. The modulated signal spectral occupancy can be modified according to the channel frequency response to facilitate information retrieval at the receiver. New generation of coherent optical transmission systems operating at high rates are subject to various bandwidth restrictions aspects, such as electronic components limitations and optical filtering via ROADMs deployed on networks. As noted in technical literature, the RZ pulse formats have some advantages compared to traditional NRZ pulses in optical fiber transmissions. In particular, RZ pulses have a better performance in situations where nonlinear effects of the fiber severely impact the quality of transmission. Among other situations, this occurs in systems that employ modulation formats for high order QAM (16QAM, 64QAM, etc.). Moreover, since RZ pulses have shorter duty cycle, temporal spread of the transmitted symbols causes less performance degradation due to ISI compared with NRZ pulses. This report presents results of experiments carried out in a 226 km recirculation loop, to evaluate the performance of NRZ, RZ 67%, 50% RZ and RZ 33% pulse shapes in a transmission of DP-16QAM (or PDM-16QAM). As application it is proposed and experimentally demonstrated a transmission system that employ 28 GBaud dual carrier PDM-16QAM channels operating with a total line rate of 448 Gb/s each, utilizing RZ pulse format and carrier narrow pre-filtering to increase spectral efficiency of transmission, aggregating a 400G channel in a 75 GHz WDM grid.