A nonlinearity-tolerant frequency domain root M-shaped pulse for coherent optical communication systems.

A new intersymbol interference (ISI)-free nonlinearity-tolerant frequency domain root M-shaped pulse (RMP) is derived for dispersion unmanaged coherent optical transmission systems. Beginning with the relationship between pulse shaping and intra-channel nonlinearity effects, we derive closed-form expressions for the proposed pulse. Experimental demonstrations reveal that by employing the proposed pulse at a roll-off factor of 1, the maximum transmission reach of a single-channel 56 Gb/s polarization-division-multiplexed quadrature phase-shift keying (PDM-QPSK) system can be extended by 33% and 17%, when compared to systems using a root raised cosine (RRC) pulse and a root optimized pulse (ROP), respectively. For a single-channel 128 Gb/s polarization-division-multiplexed 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (PDM-16QAM) system, the reach can be extended by 44% and 18%, respectively. Reach increases of 30% and 13% are also observed for a dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) 504 Gb/s PDM-QPSK transmission system. The tolerance to narrow filtering effect for the three pulses is experimentally studied as well.