Experimental Demonstration of Rate-Adaptation via Hybrid Polar-BCH Product Code for Flexible PON

The flexible-rate Polar-BCH product codes are experimentally demonstrated in a coherent passive optical network system with 16QAM for the first time. Using a new hybrid soft- and hard-decision decoder, we achieve a power gain of upto 1.75 dB over traditional BCH-BCH product codes after 48 km transmission.