Experimental demonstrations of dual polarization CO-OFDM using mid-span spectral inversion for nonlinearity compensation.

ABSTRACT

We experimentally demonstrate fiber nonlinearity compensation in dual polarization coherent optical OFDM (DP CO-OFDM) systems using mid-span spectral inversion (MSSI). We use third-order nonlinearity between a pump and the signal in a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) for MSSI. Maximum launch powers at FEC threshold for two 10 × 80-km 16-QAM OFDM systems were increased by 6.4 dB at a 121-Gb/s data rate and 2.8 dB at 1.2 Tb/s. The experimental results are the first demonstration of using MSSI for nonlinearity compensation in any dual polarization coherent system. Simulations show that these increases could support a 22% increase in total transmission distance at 1.2-Tb/s system without increasing the number of inline amplifiers, by extending the fiber spans from 90 to 110 km. When spans of 80 km are used, simulations reveal that MSSI system performance shows less degradation with increasing transmission distance, and an overall transmission distance increase of more than 70% is expected using MSSI.