PAM-6 Coded Modulation for IM/DD Channels with a Peak-Power Constraint

Abstract: Coded modulation with probabilistic amplitude shaping (PAS) is considered for intensity modulation/direct detection channels with a transmitter peak-power constraint. PAS is used to map bits to a uniform PAM-6 distribution and outperforms PAM-8 for rates up to around 2.3 bits per channel use. PAM-6 with PAS also outperforms a cross-shaped QAM-32 constellation by up to 1 dB and 0.65 dB after bit-metric soft- and hard decoding, respectively. An alternative PAM-6 scheme based on a framed cross-shaped QAM-32 constellation is proposed that shows similar gains.