Experimental study of performance enhanced IM/DD transmissions combining 4D Trellis coded modulation with precoding.

We propose to combine 4D trellis-coded modulation (TCM) with transmitter-side Tomlinson-Harashima precoding (THP) in IM/DD transmissions, and experimentally investigate the achieved performance improvement. Theoretically, THP can approximately produce an end-to-end additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel even with severe bandwidth limitation, allowing TCM to maintain its coding gain in the presence of inter-symbol interference. In our experiments with off-the-shelf commercial components, which limit the 3 dB bandwidth of the system to be ~3.5 GHz, the combination of TCM and THP shows a better receiver sensitivity for various system bit rates from 56 Gbit/s to 112 Gbit/s, considering the KP4 threshold of BER = 2 × 10-4. In the 112 Gbit/s back-to-back (B2B) transmission, with the help of THP the receiver sensitivity is improved by 3.3 dB using 4D-PAM4 TCM at the KP4 FEC threshold compared with using conventional PAM4. In addition, combining TCM and THP also helps to lower the BER floor.