Comparison of FTN-NOFDM and PCS-OFDM for Long-Haul Coherent Optical Communications

Single-wavelength 400 G coherent optical communications have become a critical solution to meet the explosive traffic demands. However, the single-carrier modulation using low-order modulation formats requires a broader wavelength division multiplexing grid and expands the occupied optical bandwidth. In this paper, we propose the faster-than-Nyquist non-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (FTN-NOFDM) to improve the spectral efficiency for long-haul coherent optical communications. The subcarrier number is set to eight to enable low-complexity FTN-NOFDM signal generation using a pruned inverse fast Fourier transform and inter-carrier interference (ICI) cancellation. To deal with the conventional timing recovery (TR) failure, a frequency tone-based TR is proposed for FTN-NOFDM. A time-domain multiple-input multiple-output equalizer is designed to update the tap coefficients based on outputs of conventional iterative detection (ID). To further mitigate ICI, a low-density parity check-assisted ID is integrated into the conventional ID module. FTN-NOFDM, probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS)-OFDM, and quadrature phase shift keying-OFDM are experimentally compared in a 400 G coherent optical communication system over 11 cascaded 125-GHz wavelength-selective switches (WSSs) and 2000 km transmission. Results show that the FTN-NOFDM exhibits comparable WSS filtering tolerance to PCS-OFDM and superior nonlinearity tolerance, while PCS-OFDM achieves the best bit error ratio performance.