Field Demonstration of up to 3 Tb/s Real-Time Superchannel Transport Over 359 km Using a Fully Managed Flexible Grid Infrastructure With Net Spectral Efficiency of 5.97 b/s/Hz

We report the first successful field trial of up to 3 Tb/s real-time DP-16 QAM optical superchannel transport over 359-km EDFA-amplified fully managed flexible grid optical infrastructure using production grade hardware and management software from a live network operation center. The spectrum of the flexible grid ROADM was configured according to the requirement of the optical superchannel from a minimum of 37.5 up to 400 GHz with a resolution of 12.5 GHz. Spectral windows larger than 400 GHz were achieved by configuring multiple adjacent spectral slots enabling higher superchannel capacities. The optical superchannels of up to 3 Tb/s propagated alongside standard 50-GHz grid wavelength channels at 100 Gb/s. Stable error-free performance was measured for all sub-channel spacings down to 33.5 GHz, where a record net spectral efficiency of 5.97 b/s/Hz was achieved, an improvement of 49.25% over standard 50 GHz grid. We also show results on optical margin requirements when operating across a range of sub-channel spacings corresponding to different spectral efficiencies. Furthermore, a key technology building block for the 3-Tb/s optical superchannel, 200 G DP-16 QAM was trialed in a live WDM network to evaluate and demonstrate its applicability for deployment.