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Figure 1. Historic serial bit rate and WDM system capacity scaling in research and products.
and polarization-division multiplexing (PDM). Research over the last several years has concluded that 28-GBaud PDM quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) with coherent detection [11] is a promising approach for 100G WAN transmission on a 50-GHz WDM grid over ~1500 km of standard fiber including several ROADMs. This format was consequently taken up by the Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) as the de facto standard for 100G WAN transponders. The first single-carrier 100G PDM-QPSK product has recently been announced by Alcatel-Lucent. Some initial 100G products reused existing 40-Gb/s PDM-QPSK technology by combining two 20-GHz spaced 14.4 GBaud PDM-QPSK optical subcarriers to form an inverse-multiplexed 100G OTN channel [12]. However, in the history of WDM transport, pushing per-wavelength bit rates to the full desired interface rate has generally proven more economical than inverse multiplexing over multiple lower-bit-rate wavelengths.
even 8 50 Gb/s by improving the latter. The 4 100 Gb/s option that would maintain the degree of optical parallelization used by 100G Ethernet seems a stretch today, not only from a component availability perspective but also from the inherently 16 times lower chromatic dispersion tolerance at 100 Gb/s than at 25 Gb/s, and the significantly higher received optical signal power requirements. In short, the degree of optical parallelization is expected to further increase compared to the 100G Ethernet standard, asking for denser photonic integration to make 400G commercially viable.
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instead of single-carrier modulation, as shown in Figs. 2a and 2b, but OFDM is typically somewhat less spectrally efficient than the corresponding single-carrier format due to cyclic prefix, pilot, and training symbol overheads [14]. The digital signal processing complexity of the two options is about the same [15]. Considering recently reported single-carrier high-speed QAM demonstrations (cf. signal constellations shown in Fig. 3), near-term commercialization of 32-QAM or 256-QAM at 448 Gb/s seems out of reach, for both single-carrier modulation and electronically processed OFDM. One solution would be to relax the high spectral efficiency requirement by abandoning the rigid 50-GHz WDM grid and allowing, for example, 56 GBaud PDM 16-QAM on a flexible ~70- to ~80-GHz WDM grid at a spectral efficiency between 6 and 5 b/s/Hz, the latter with adequate ROADM support. A preference for flexible solutions of this kind is typically voiced by heavily data-centric users operating their own high-capacity data pipes between their data centers. In contrast, telecommunication carriers with large mesh networks supporting diverse services tend to prefer sticking to the established 50GHz grid. To accommodate the 50-GHz boundary condition, one could inverse multiplex a 448-Gb/s channel onto two 224-Gb/s wavelengths on a 50-GHz grid using, say, 28GBaud PDM 16-QAM for a net spectral efficiency of 4 b/s/Hz [19] and an associated doubling in per-fiber WDM capacity compared to 100G PDM-QPSK. Another solution would be to substitute a single-carrier 448-Gb/s signal by an orthogonal 3 multiplex of lower-speed optical subcarriers modulated at 32-QAM or more. This solution, referred to as coherent WDM or coherent optical OFDM, is qualitatively different from dense WDM inverse multiplexing in that it can preserve the spectral efficiency of single-carrier modulation for a given modulation format [21]. As can be seen from the associated transmitter architecture in Fig. 2c, electrical multiplexing and digital signal processing complexity are traded for electro-optic parallelism. Note that the degree of parallelism can differ between transmitter and receiver. For example, and as shown in the inset to Fig. 2c [22], a 448Gb/s transmitter could use 10 individually modulated orthogonal optical subcarriers, while the receiver could detect them in two groups of five, an approach taken in a recent 448Gb/s demonstration [22]. As discussed above, striving for the highest possible subcarrier bit rates that can still be handled
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electronically while keeping optical parallelization to a minimum will generally lead to the most practical and likely most cost-effective solution. Apart from the technological difficulties associated with high spectral efficiency 400G WAN transport, the achievable transmission reach is of great concern. Minimizing the number of generally expensive and power-hungry opto-electronic regenerators by increasing the optically transparent reach of a system is key to its economic success. From a modulation point of view, the system reach is primarily determined by the format-specific signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) required at the receiver to guarantee error-free performance. As shown in Fig. 4, Shannons theory dictates a trade-off between spectral efficiency and the required SNR per bit. Squares represent recent experimental results for multi-Gbaud QAM, and circles denote the corresponding theoretical limits, assuming state-ofthe-art 7 percent overhead hard-decision FEC. Note that for low constellation sizes, increasing the constellation results in modestly higher SNR requirements. For example, going from QPSK to 16-QAM doubles the spectral efficiency (and with it the WDM capacity within a given optical amplification band) at an SNR penalty of 3.8 dB. However, doubling the spectral efficiency again by going from 16-QAM to 256-QAM results in a further SNR penalty of 8.8 dB, all practical implementation penalties aside. In addition, increasing the per-channel symbol rate and/or the size of the symbol constellation may affect the optical signal power that can be launched into the fiber without generating excessive nonlinear signal distortions [24]. A possible launch power reduction enters the link budget the same way as an SNR penalty from using a richer symbol constellation. A quantification of this nonlinear penalty depends on a host of system parameters and cannot be given generally. In order to maintain the reach of a typical 100G WAN transport system (~1500 km), several system improvements have to be made to recover the lost SNR, including the use of low-loss low-nonlinearity optical fiber, Raman amplification, and stronger FEC.
1T TECHNOLOGY OPTIONS
As became evident in our discussion of 400G interface options, 1-Tb/s interface rates seem distant today from a technology point of view, unless massively parallel transport in the LAN and moderate spectral efficiencies in the WAN are being considered. Extrapolating the progress of serial bit rate research (green line in Fig. 1), 1-Tb/s serial interface experiments could be expected around 2020. The exponential scaling of serial bit rates at about 12 percent (0.5 dB) per year follows the speed increase of semiconductor devices [25],
Two subcarriers are orthogonal if they are spaced in frequency by the symbol rate and if the symbols on each subcarrier are temporally aligned.
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Figure 3. Recently reported high-speed multi-level constellations for single-carrier modulation [1620]. Reproduced with permission. which are currently able to provide 172-Gb/s logic circuits [26] that could be used to implement serial bit rates close to 300 Gb/s. Note that the use of higher-order modulation (M-QAM) is unlikely to change this scaling, since richer constellations require a higher effective number of bits (ENoB) in digital-toanalog and analog-to-digital conversion (DAC, ADC). Comparing the increased ADC requirements for M-QAM [27] with Waldens observations on the scaling of ADCs [28], which improve at about 1/3 ENoB per year at constant converter speed, we find little room for an extra increase in serial bit rates by going to higher-order modulation in addition to adopting higher symbol rates. As a consequence, and in contrast to 400G, 1T Ethernet and OTN will almost certainly need significantly parallel transport interfaces, in the LAN and in the WAN. Experimental demonstrations of such 1.2Tb/s optical superchannels have been reported [29] using the scheme shown in Fig. 2c. Solutions of this kind require considerable optical parallelization and hence ask for massive photonic integration for viable commercialization. Recent examples of monolithic photonic integration include a 10 45.6 Gb/s differential PDM-QPSK direct detection receiver [30] and a 4 43 Gb/s PDM-QPSK coherent receiver [31] implemented on InP, and a 112-Gb/s coherent receiver implemented on Si [32]. In the WAN a further increase beyond the 8-b/s/Hz spectral efficiency mentioned above for 400G to, say, 16 b/s/Hz is certainly very challenging (in particular for commercialization by 2020), but is not yet fundamentally impossible. Recent studies on the Shannon capacity of nonlinear fiber channels estimate the spectral efficiency limit of a polarization-multiplexed 1000-km link of standard fiber to be at ~16 b/s/Hz [24]. Nevertheless, reaching such high values at high interface rates will be increasingly difficult. The fact that current research has approached fundamental Shannon limits to within a strikingly close factor of ~3 [24] is also reflected in Fig. 1 (triangles). The slope in WDM research capacity growth (and in PDM/WDM capacity growth after 2000) has changed from ~2.5 dB/year (~78 percent/year) to ~0.8 dB/year (~20 percent/year), with a similar trend seen in WDM products. It is very well possible that WAN transport will eventually have to resort to spatially parallel transmission technologies, in the form of either multiple parallel fibers or multimode optical fiber structures in order to guarantee the scaling of network capacities well into the future [33]. able to use polarization-multiplexed multilevel modulation on a single optical carrier in the WAN. Single-wavelength optical 100G WAN interfaces as well as 100G router ports are commercially available today. Interfaces at 400G seem to be a technologically viable next step for standardization, in both the LAN and the WAN. With 400G, some optical parallelization may be entering the WAN, from both the interface bit rate and spectral efficiency points of view. Significant optical parallelization will be needed for 1T interfaces in LAN and WAN, even when taking into account the anticipated progress in serial bit rate research until 2020. The need for optical parallelization will require substantial improvements in photonic integration technologies to meet some of the explicit requirements for Ethernet standardization, which include technical feasibility, economic feasibility, and a broad market potential.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author is grateful for many enlightening discussions with Bob Tkach, Andy Chraplyvy, Rene-Jean Essiambre, Xiang Liu, S. Chandrasekhar, Alan Gnauck, Jeff Sinsky, Chris Doerr, Steve Trowbridge, Bernd Teichmann, Nils Weimann, Y. K. Chen, Nick Sauer, and Andras Kalmar.
REFERENCES
[1] P. J. Winzer, G. Raybon, and M. Duelk, 107-Gb/s Optical ETDM Transmitter for 100G Ethernet Transport, Proc. ECOC, paper Th4.1.1, 2005.
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CONCLUSION
With the new 100G standard, Ethernet has caught up with OTN in employing the highest serial bit rates that are technologically feasible today. As a consequence, 100G has to resort to parallel transport technologies in the LAN, while still being
Figure 4. Trade-off between spectral efficiency and SNR as dictated by Shannon; spectral efficiency values refer to a single polarization. (Circles: Theoretical performance; squares: experimental results.) From [23], reproduced with permission.
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