Capacity achieving nonbinary LDPC coded non-uniform shaping modulation for adaptive optical communications

A mutual information inspired nonbinary coded modulation design with non-uniform shaping is proposed. Instead of traditional power of two signal constellation sizes, we design 5-QAM, 7-QAM and 9-QAM constellations, which can be used in adaptive optical networks. The non-uniform shaping and LDPC code rate are jointly considered in the design, which results in a better performance scheme for the same SNR values. The matched nonbinary (NB) LDPC code is used for this scheme, which further improves the coding gain and the overall performance. We analyze both coding performance and system SNR performance. We show that the proposed NB LDPC-coded 9-QAM has more than 2dB gain in symbol SNR compared to traditional LDPC-coded star-8-QAM. On the other hand, the proposed NB LDPC-coded 5-QAM and 7-QAM have even better performance than LDPC-coded QPSK.