Impact of Bandwidth Efficiency in Nonlinear Tolerance of Multicarrier Modulations

We report on numerical and experimental comparison of the nonlinear tolerance of multicarrier and single-carrier modulations when changing the bandwidth efficiency. We worked with two different configurations at 24 and 48 GBd DP-QPSK in a 50-GHz spaced WDM grid, using 4 and 8 subcarriers, and we compared the results with an equivalent single-carrier system. Both results, numerical and experimental, demonstrate an impact of the bandwidth efficiency in the performance of the multicarrier architecture and indicate that the nonlinear tolerance improvement of the multicarrier approach decreases with the bandwidth efficiency.