Field Trial of Real-Time 400GbE Superchannel Using Configurable Modulation Formats

We report a successful field trial of real-time optical superchannel transport of 400Gb/s Ethernet client traffic over a 216-km flexible grid G.652 fiber link using 64GBaud flexible rate optical transponders. We demonstrated, for the first time, error free transport of 400 GbE client traffic over an ultraefficient optical superchannel of 2 × 200G using modulation formats DP-16QAM, DP-8QAM, and DP-QPSK. Error free performance of 400GbE ultra-efficient optical superchannel was achieved at different channel separations as narrow as 37.5 GHz for DP-16QAM, 39 GHz for DP-8QAM, and 50 GHz for DP-QPSK. We also successfully demonstrated non-contiguous 400GbE optical superchannel, where the optical sub-channels are in non-adjacent spectral slots across the whole C-band (3.85 THz apart). Stable long term (overnight) error free optical performance and end-to-end 400 GbE full throughput were measured.