Field Trial of a Flexible Real-time Software-defined GPU-based Optical Receiver

We introduce a flexible, software-defined real-time multi-modulation format receiver implemented on an off-the-shelf general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPU). The flexible receiver is able to process 2 GBaud 2-, 4-, 8-, and 16-ary pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM) signals as well as 1 GBaud 4-, 16- and 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals, with the latter detected using a Kramers-Kronig (KK) coherent receiver. Experimental performance evaluation is shown for back-to-back. In addition, by using the JGN high speed R&D network testbed, performance is evaluated after transmission over 91 km field-deployed optical fiber and reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexers (ROADMs).
Comment: Accepted for publication at Journal of Lightwave Technology, already available via JLT Early Access, see supplied DOI. This v2 version of the article is improved w.r.t. v1 after JLT peer-review. This article is a longer journal version of the conference paper: S.P. van der Heide, et al., Real-time, Software-Defined, GPU-Based Receiver Field Trial, ECOC 2020 paper We1E5, also via arXiv:2010.14333