Effects of Receiver-Side Optical Filtering On Optical Superchannel System Performance

Optical superchannels provide a route to obtaining the highest achievable data rates in optical fiber systems. Here, we investigate the role of optical filtering on system performance and required optical signal-to-noise ratio, when receiving a single sub-band from an optical superchannel, where the dominant noise source changes from optical to transceiver noise. We find that optical filtering can provide improvement up to 3 dB in signal quality and around 1 b/symbol in information rate, in an experiment where transceiver noise is dominant.