402.7-Tb/s MDM-WDM Transmission over Weakly Coupled 10-Mode Fiber Using Rate-Adaptive PS-16QAM Signals

The mode-division-multiplexing (MDM) transmission technique using a few-mode fiber (FMF) has been investigated to overcome the theoretical limitation of the transmission capacity of a single-mode fiber. In MDM transmission, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) digital signal processing (DSP) is generally required on the receiver side to compensate for the modal crosstalk (XT) between the spatial modes. However, the computational cost is high, especially for high-order MDM systems that use many spatial modes. To reduce the MIMO matrix size, MDM transmission with partial MIMO-based DSP has been proposed using weakly coupled FMFs. The modal XT in such fibers can be suppressed by a special fiber design; however, the modal XT still remains and strongly limits the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) and capacity. To further increase the capacity for a given SNR, an optimization of the modulation format is significant. Recently, probabilistic shaping (PS) has received attention since it can gradually change the entropy of a modulation format and maximize the capacity for a given SNR. In this article, we demonstrate weakly coupled 10-mode-multiplexed transmission with four 4 × 4 MIMOs and two 2 × 2 MIMOs using rate-adaptive PS-16QAM signals over 48-km FMF, achieving a record transmission capacity of 402.7 Tb/s in 125-μm cladding single-core fiber transmission experiments. Furthermore, we also show the possibility of a further capacity increase by adjusting the entropies of the PS-16QAM signals depending on the spatial mode.