Probabilistically Shaped Rate-Adaptive Polar-Coded 256-QAM WDM Optical Transmission System

In this article, a rate-adaptive coded modulation (CM) system combining polar codes and many-to-one probabilistic shaping is constructed and experimentally demonstrated. We propose to control the polar codes using a fraction of bits referred to as pre-set bits. This not only allows to offset the puncturing loss of rate-adaptive polar codes but also provides shaping gains compared to the non-punctured polar codes. Pre-set bits and many-to-one shaping are combined to form a rate-adaptive bit-interleaved CM system. We experimentally evaluate the system performance for 10 × 8-GBd dual polarization 256 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) system with various input data rates ranging from 61 to 91 Gbps per carrier. The experimental results demonstrate a 200 km reach increase over a wide range of distances compared to the non-punctured polar codes and punctured polar codes.