List-Encoding CCDM: A Nonlinearity-Tolerant Shaper Aided by Energy Dispersion Index

Recently, a metric called energy dispersion index (EDI) was proposed to qualitatively indicate the nonlinear interference (NLI) induced by correlated symbols during optical transmission. In this paper, we propose a new shaper architecture to decrease the EDI of transmitted symbols and thus, increase the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We call this shaper the list-encoding constant-composition distribution matcher (L-CCDM). L-CCDM consists of an additional EDI selecting module, which is compatible with standard probabilistic amplitude shaping (PAS) architecture. Numerical results obtained from a multi-span multi-channel system show that when compared to standard CCDM with 256-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (256QAM), the proposed architecture offers an effective SNR gain of 0.35 dB, an achievable information rate gain of 0.22 b/4D-symbol, or equivalently an 8% reach extension.