Huawei prototypes 40-Tbps WDM system

Last week at OFC/NFOEC, Huawei displayed a prototype system designed to transmit 40 Tbps on a single fiber. The total capacity comes via 20 superchannels within the C-Band, each supporting 2 Tbps.

The prototype system involves a variety of coherent transmission and encoding technologies. In particular, Huawei points to the use of electrical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (eOFDM) and frequency-domain hybrid QAM as pathways towards spectrum efficiency of 10 bps/Hz. The system in Huawei’s both leveraged the company’s Flex-Optical Digital Signal Processing (Flex ODSP) and Hybrid Soft-/Hard-Decision Multi-level Coding (HMLC) to support reaches greater than 1000 km over common singlemode fiber links equipped with EDFAs.

At the same time, Huawei also demonstrated its ability to switch among and/or combine multiple modulation types, including quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), 16QAM, 32QAM, and 64QAM.

The new 40-Tbps prototype comes on the heels of a 2-Tbps system Huawei field trialed last year with Vodafone.

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