Probabilistically-Shaped Coded Modulation with Hard Decision Decoding for Coherent Optical Systems

Alireza Sheikh, Alexandre Graell i Amat, Gianluigi Liva

Abstract: We consider probabilistic shaping to maximize the achievable information rate of coded modulation (CM) with hard decision decoding. The proposed scheme using binary staircase codes outperforms its uniform CM counterpart by more than 1.3 dB for 64-QAM and 5 bits/symbol.