Experimental demonstration of 201.6-Gbit/s coherent probabilistic shaping QAM transmission with quantum noise stream cipher over a 1200-km standard single mode fiber

Abstract

A probabilistic shaping (PS) quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) based on Y-00 quantum noise stream cipher (QNSC) has been proposed. We experimentally demonstrated this scheme with data rate of 201.6Gbit/s over a 1200-km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) under a 20% SD-FEC threshold. Accounting for the 20% FEC and 6.25% pilot overhead, the achieved net data rate is ∼160Gbit/s. In the proposed scheme, a mathematical cipher (Y-00 protocol) is utilized to convert the original low-order modulation PS-16 (22 × 22) QAM into ultra-dense high-order modulation PS-65536 (28 × 28) QAM. Then, the physical randomness of quantum (shot) noise at photodetection and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise from optical amplifiers are employed to mask the encrypted ultra-dense high-order signal for further improving the security. We further analyze the security performance by two metrics known in the reported QNSC systems, namely the number of masked signals (NMS) of noise and the detection failure probability (DFP). Experimental results show it is difficult or even impossible to extract transmission signals from quantum or ASE noise for an eavesdropper (Eve). We believe that the proposed PS-QAM/QNSC secure transmission scheme has the potential to be compatible with existing high-speed long-distance optical fiber communication systems.