Flex-Rate Transmission using Hybrid Probabilistic and Geometric Shaped 32QAM

A novel algorithm to design geometric shaped 32QAM to work with probabilistic shaping is proposed to approach the Shannon limit within ~0.2 dB in SNR. The experimental results show ~0.2 dB SNR advantage over 64Gbaud PAS-64QAM, and flex-rate transmission demonstrates > 500 km reach improvement over 32QAM.