  Time-frequency packing (TFP) transmission provides the highest achievable
spectral efficiency with a constrained symbol alphabet and detector complexity.
In this work, the application of the TFP technique to fiber-optic systems is
investigated and experimentally demonstrated. The main theoretical aspects,
design guidelines, and implementation issues are discussed, focusing on those
aspects which are peculiar to TFP systems. In particular, adaptive compensation
of propagation impairments, matched filtering, and maximum a posteriori
probability detection are obtained by a combination of a butterfly equalizer
and four 8-state parallel Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) detectors. A novel
algorithm that ensures adaptive equalization, channel estimation, and a proper
distribution of tasks between the equalizer and BCJR detectors is proposed. A
set of irregular low-density parity-check codes with different rates is
designed to operate at low error rates and approach the spectral efficiency
limit achievable by TFP at different signal-to-noise ratios. An experimental
demonstration of the designed system is finally provided with five
dual-polarization QPSK-modulated optical carriers, densely packed in a 100 GHz
bandwidth, employing a recirculating loop to test the performance of the system
at different transmission distances.
