At the prestigious European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC) held in Germany in September 2024, a paper authored by Zhao Can, a second-year master's student from our institute, was selected as a Top-Scored Paper and received an invitation to contribute an invited paper to the IEEE/Optica Journal of Lightwave Technology (JLT). This collaborative research was conducted by Hefei University of Technology, Suzhou University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, with Associate Professor Chen Bin from our institute serving as the corresponding author. Notably, this is the first Top-Scored Paper from our institute at ECOC.

ECOC is one of the most authoritative and large-scale conferences in the optical fiber communication industry worldwide. Each year, ECOC selects the highest-quality papers as Top-Scored Papers, a distinction achieved by fewer than 15 papers out of over 800 submissions in 2024.

The awarded paper, titled "Experimental Demonstration of 16D Voronoi Constellation with Two-Level Coding over 50km Four-Core Fiber," addresses the advantages and challenges of capacity expansion in future multi-core fiber technology. The research proposes a novel multi-core fiber transmission method based on 16-dimensional joint coded modulation (MLC-16DVC) (as illustrated in Figure 1). Through a single-span 50km four-core fiber transmission experiment (experimental system shown in Figure 2), the proposed method demonstrated significant advantages over traditional two-dimensional independent QAM modulation. Specifically, it exhibited greater tolerance to inter-core signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) variations and achieved a 6dB optical power gain at the outer hard-decision error correction threshold (as shown in Figure 3).

This recognition highlights the cutting-edge research being conducted by our institute and strengthens our presence in the global optical communication field.

Figure 1: Schematic Comparison of Traditional Two-Dimensional Modulation and Multi-Dimensional Modulation in Four-Core Fiber Transmission Systems

Figure 2: Experimental Block Diagram of Four-Core Fiber Transmission Based on Multi-Dimensional Coded Modulation

Figure 3: Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) and Bit Error Rate (BER) Results for 50km Four-Core Fiber Transmission