Advanced modulation formats for high-capacity optical transport networks

Advanced optical modulation formats have become a key ingredient to the design of modern wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) optically routed networks. In this paper, we review the generation and detection of multigigabit/second intensity- and phase-modulated formats and highlight their resilience to key impairments found in optical networking, such as optical amplifier noise, chromatic dispersion, polarization-mode dispersion, VMM crosstalk, concatenated optical filtering, and fiber nonlinearity.