Four-dimensional optical multiband-OFDM for beyond 1.4 Tb/s serial optical transmission

We propose a four-dimensional (4D) coded multiband-OFDM scheme suitable for beyond 1.4 Tb/s serial optical transport. The proposed scheme organizes the N-dimensional (ND) signal constellation points in the form of signal matrix; employs 2D-inverse FFT and 2D-FFT to perform modulation and demodulation, respectively; and exploits both orthogonal polarizations. This scheme can fully exploit advantages of OFDM to deal with chromatic dispersion, PMD and PDL effects; and multidimensional signal constellations to improve OSNR sensitivity of conventional optical OFDM. The improvement of 4D-OFDM over corresponding polarization-multiplexed QAM (with the same number of constellation points) ranges from 1.79 dB for 16 signal constellation point-four-dimensional-OFDM (16-4D-OFDM) up to 4.53 dB for 128-4D-OFDM.