Coherent WDM Transmission Over NANF for High-Capacity Intra-Data-Center Interconnection

Coherent wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) transmission technique has been penetrated into the intra-data-center interconnection (Intra-DCI), due to its capability of high receiver sensitivity and efficient impairment mitigation. Here, we experimentally present a coherent WDM transmission of 40-channel 60 GBaud dual-polarization 16-level quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-16QAM) signals covering the extended C-band over 500 m homemade nested anti-resonant nodeless fiber (NANF) for high-capacity Intra-DCI. We also propose to utilize a simplified Volterra nonlinear equalizer (S-VNE) to mitigate the transmission nonlinearities originating from the transmistter hardware, resulting in 17.2% and 23% computational complextity reduction in terms of additions and multiplications with almost negligible performance penalty, in comparison with conventional VNE. As a result, the bit-error ratio (BER) of all 40 WDM channels can be lower than the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of BER = 4.5×10⁻³. We experimentally realize a net bit-rate of 448.6 Gbit/s per wavelength and a total transmission capacity of 17.9 Tbit/s.