Real-time demonstration of a low-complexity PS scheme for 16QAM-DMT signals in an IM-DD system

We experimentally demonstrated a low-complexity probabilistic shaping (PS) 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) scheme based on intra-symbol bit-weighted distribution matching (Intra-SBWDM) for discrete multi-tone (DMT) symbols with field-programmable gate array implementation in an intensity modulation and direct detection (IM-DD) system. Different from the traditional PS scheme such as Gallager many-to-one mapping, hierarchical distribution matching and constant composition distribution matching, the Intra-SBWDM scheme with lower computation and hardware complexity does not need to continuously refine the interval to find the target symbol probability, nor does it need a look-up table, so it does not introduce a large number of extra redundant bits. In our experiment, four PS parameter values (k = 4, 5, 6, and 7) are investigated in a real-time short-reach IM-DD system. 31.87-Gbit/s net bit PS-16QAM-DMT (k = 4) signal transmission is achieved. The results show that the receiver sensitivity in terms of the received optical power of the real-time PS scheme based on Intra-SBWDM (k = 4) over OBTB/20 km standard single-mode fiber can be improved by about 1.8/2.2 dB at the bit error rate (BER) of 3.8 × 10^-3, compared to the uniformly-distributed DMT. In addition, the BER is steadily lower than 3.8 × 10^-3 during a one-hour measurement for PS-DMT transmission system.