Performance Evaluation of High-Speed Polar Coded CO-OFDM System with Nonlinear and Linear Impairments

In this paper, the performance of polar code in high-speed coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) system with nonlinear and linear impairments is comprehensively investigated for the first time. Results show that soft decision-based polar code is slightly affected by nonlinearity-induced non-Gaussian noise but still performs strong robustness. In the nonlinear domain of single-channel 40-Gb/s CO-OFDM at 320-km of transmission, with the help of polar code, the nonlinear tolerance is extended by 4 dB and a maximum code gain (in Q-factor) of 5.9 dB is achieved under symmetric dispersion compensation. Meanwhile, polar code significantly resists linear impairment in both nonlinear and linear domains.