The nonlinear Fourier transform has the potential to overcome limits on performance and achievable data rates which arise in modern optical fiber communication systems when nonlinear interference is treated as noise. The periodic nonlinear Fourier transform (PNFT) has been much less investigated compared to its counterpart based on vanishing boundary conditions. In this paper, we design a first experiment based on the PNFT in which information is encoded in the invariant nonlinear main spectrum. To this end, we propose a method to construct a set of periodic waveforms which each have the same fixed period, by employing the exact inverse PNFT algorithm developed in Part I. We demonstrate feasibility of the transmission scheme in experiment in good agreement with simulations and obtain a bit-error ratio of 10 −3 over a distance of 2000km. It is shown that the transmission reach is significantly longer than expected from a naive estimate based on group velocity dispersion and cyclic prefix length, which is explained through a dominating solitonic component in the transmitted waveform. Our constellation design can be generalized to an arbitrary number of nonlinear degrees of freedom.
I. IntroductionF UELED by ever increasing online traffic demands, the capacity of optical communication links has grown exponentially in a Moore-like fashion, following a tenfold increase every four years [1]. This trend has been kept up owing to the introduction of new technologies, starting from improved transmission fibers and continuing with the Erbium-doped fiber amplifier, wavelength-division multiplexing and high spectral efficiency coding. Even with advanced digital signal processing and coded modulation schemes, in particular probabilistic shaping [2], modern optical transmission systems are approaching the so-called nonlinear Shannon limit [3]. Not regarded as fundamental [4], it emerges as an artifact of the application of communication techniques developed for linear channels, in which nonlinear interference is treated as noise. While SNR increases limitless with increasing power, the signalto-interference-plus-noise ratio reaches an optimum [5].Recently, optical communication techniques based on the nonlinear Fourier transform have reentered the focus J.-W. Goossens and H. Hafermann are with the Optical Communi-