Impact of Dispersion Slope on High-Symbol-Rate Coherent Transceivers

Next generation coherent transceivers are expected to offer capacities of 1600 Gbps per wavelength λ, potentially requiring single-carrier symbol rates of 240 GBd or more. The analysis of higher order physical layer effects at these elevated symbol rates gains relevance in terms of performance and complexity. In this work, we investigate by simulations the impact of second order group velocity dispersion (SO-GVD) for high symbol rate coherent transceivers. We experimentally emulated a 160 GBd transmission of up to 70.8 ps/nm2 of accumulated SO-GVD. An approximation for the memory length of a SO-GVD compensation filter is presented. We show that compensating for SO-GVD within a static frequency domain chromatic dispersion compensator (CDC) leads to a reduction in operational complexity.