Eight-state trellis-coded optical modulation with signal constellations of four-dimensional M-ary quadrature-amplitude modulation.

We apply the eight-state trellis-coded modulation (TCM) using signal constellations of four-dimensional M-ary quadrature-amplitude modulation (4D-MQAM) to optical communication systems for the first time to our knowledge. In the TCM scheme, the free distance of the trellis diagram is equal to the minimum distance between constellation points in partitioned subsets, which enlarges the coding gain effectively. In fact, its asymptotic power efficiency is 3-dB larger than that of the set-partitioned 4D-MQAM (SP-4D-MQAM) format, while their spectral efficiencies are the same. Such theoretical predictions are confirmed through computer simulations on eight-state TCM with constellations of 4D-4QAM (i.e., 4D quadrature phase-shift keying: 4D-QPSK) and 4D-16QAM. In particular, eight-state TCM with 4D-QPSK constellations is practically important because of its simple encoder structure, relatively low computational cost, and high coding gain against dual-polarization QPSK (DP-QPSK) and SP-4D-QPSK. Through measurements of its bit-error rate (BER) performance, we confirm that the coding gain against DP-QPSK is about 3 dB at BER=10(-3).