Achievable rate degradation of ultra-wideband coherent fiber communication systems due to stimulated Raman scattering

As the bandwidths of optical communication systems are increased to maximize channel capacity, the impact of stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) on the achievable information rates (AIR) in ultra-wideband coherent WDM systems becomes significant, and is investigated in this work, for the first time. By modifying the GN-model to account for SRS, it is possible to derive a closed-form expression that predicts the optical signal-to-noise ratio of all channels at the receiver for bandwidths of up to 15 THz, which is in excellent agreement with numerical calculations. It is shown that, with fixed modulation and coding rate, SRS leads to a drop of approximately 40% in achievable information rates for bandwidths higher than 15 THz. However, if adaptive modulation and coding rates are applied across the entire spectrum, this AIR reduction can be limited to only 10%.