Adaptive 4~64 QAM real-time coherent optical transmission over 320 km with FPGA-based transmitter and receiver

We demonstrate the first real-time adaptive optical coherent QAM transmission with variable multiplicities (4-, 16- and 64-QAM) using an FPGA-based transmitter and receiver. Rate-variable transmission (20~60 Gbit/s) was successfully achieved with a polarization multiplexing scheme at 5 Gsymbol/s over 320 km, where the OSNR margins were increased by 9 and 17 dB, respectively, by changing the modulation level from 64 to 16 and 4.