Efficient nonlinear equalizer for intra-channel nonlinearity compensation for next generation agile and dynamically reconfigurable optical networks.

In this work, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel low-complexity technique for fiber nonlinearity compensation. We achieved a transmission distance of 2818 km for a 32-GBaud dual-polarization 16QAM signal. For efficient implantation, and to facilitate integration with conventional digital signal processing (DSP) approaches, we independently compensate fiber nonlinearities after linear impairment equalization. Therefore this algorithm can be easily implemented in currently deployed transmission systems after using linear DSP. The proposed equalizer operates at one sample per symbol and requires only one computation step. The structure of the algorithm is based on a first-order perturbation model with quantized perturbation coefficients. Also, it does not require any prior calculation or detailed knowledge of the transmission system. We identified common symmetries between perturbation coefficients to avoid duplicate and unnecessary operations. In addition, we use only a few adaptive filter coefficients by grouping multiple nonlinear terms and dedicating only one adaptive nonlinear filter coefficient to each group. Finally, the complexity of the proposed algorithm is lower than previously studied nonlinear equalizers by more than one order of magnitude.

Chromatic dispersion mitigation in long-haul fiber-optic communication networks by sub-band partitioning.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel sub-band multiplexed data architecture for chromatic dispersion (CD) mitigation. We have demonstrated 32 GBaud multi-sub-band (MSB) dual-polarization (DP) 16QAM transmission over 2400 km. Using this approach, the transmitted signal bandwidth is divided into multiple narrow-bandwidth sub-bands, each operating at a lower baud rate. Within each sub-band bandwidth, the CD frequency response can be approximated as a linear-phase band-pass filter, which can be considered as an analog delay that does not require compensation. Therefore, the resulting receiver digital signal processing (DSP) is simplified due to the removal of the CD compensation equalizer. In addition, this leads to efficient parallelization of DSP tasks by deploying multiple independent sub-band processors running at a lower clock rate. The proposed system reduces receiver computational complexity and offers 1 dB higher Kerr-nonlinearity tolerance and 2% extended transmission reach in comparison to the conventional single carrier systems.

Experimental demonstration of low-complexity fiber chromatic dispersion mitigation for reduced guard-interval OFDM coherent optical communication systems based on digital spectrum sub-band multiplexing.

We experimentally demonstrate a novel digital signal processing (DSP) structure for reduced guard-interval (RGI) OFDM coherent optical systems. The proposed concept is based on digitally slicing optical channel bandwidth into multiple spectrally disjoint sub-bands which are then processed in parallel. Each low bandwidth sub-band has a smaller delay-spread compared to a full-band signal. This enables compensation of both chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion using a simple timing and one-tap-per-symbol frequency domain equalizer with a small cyclic prefix overhead. In terms of the DSP architecture, this allows for a highly efficient parallelization of DSP tasks performed over the received signal samples by deploying multiple processors running at a lower clock rate. It should be noted that this parallelization is performed in the frequency domain and it allows for flexible optical transceiver schemes. In addition, the resulting optical receiver is simplified due to the removal of the CD compensation equalizer compared to conventional RGI-OFDM systems. In this paper we experimentally demonstrate digital sub-banding of optical bandwidth. We test the system performance for different modulation formats (QPSK, 16QAM and 32QAM) over various transmission distances and optical launch powers using a 1.5% CP overhead in all scenarios. We also compare the proposed RGI-OFDM architecture performance against common single carrier modulation formats. At the same total data rate and signal bandwidth both systems have similar performance and transmission reach whereas the proposed method allows for a significant reduction of computational complexity due to removal of CD pre/post compensation equalizer.

Experimental investigation on the nonlinear tolerance of root M-shaped pulse in spectrally efficient coherent transmissions.

We experimentally demonstrate improved intra-channel nonlinearity tolerance of the root M-shaped pulse (RMP) with respect to the root raised cosine (RRC) pulse in spectrally efficient 128 Gbit/s PDM-16QAM coherent transmission systems. In addition we evaluate the impact of dispersion map and fiber dispersion parameter on the intra-channel nonlinearity tolerance of the RRC pulse and the RMP via both simulation and experimentation. The RMP is shown to have a better nonlinear tolerance than the RRC pulse for most investigated scenarios except for links with zero residual dispersion percentage per span or the zero dispersion region of a fiber. Therefore, the RMP is suitable for extending the maximum reach of spectrally efficient coherent transmission systems in legacy links in addition to currently intensively studied standard single mode fiber (SSMF) based dispersion unmanaged links.

Digital compensation of cross-phase modulation distortions using perturbation technique for dispersion-managed fiber-optic systems.

A digital compensation scheme based on a perturbation theory for mitigation of cross-phase modulation (XPM) distortions is developed for dispersion-managed fiber-optic communication systems. It is a receiver-side scheme that uses a hard-decision unit to estimate data for the calculation of XPM fields using the perturbation technique. The intra-channel nonlinear distortions are removed by intra-channel digital backward propagation (DBP) based on split-step Fourier scheme before the hard-decision unit. The perturbation technique is shown to be effective in mitigating XPM distortions. However, wrong estimations in the hard-decision unit result in performance degradation. A hard-decision correction method is proposed to correct the wrong estimations. Numerical simulations show that the hybrid compensation scheme with DBP for dispersion and intra-channel nonlinear impairments compensation and the perturbation technique for XPM compensation brings up to 3.7 dBQ and 1.7 dBQ improvements as compared with the schemes of linear compensation only and intra-channel DBP, respectively. The perturbation technique for XPM compensation requires only one-stage (or two-stage when hard-decision correction is applied) compensation and symbol-rate signal processing.

Wavelength conversion of 28 GBaud 16-QAM signals based on four-wave mixing in a silicon nanowire.

We demonstrate error-free wavelength conversion of 28 GBaud 16-QAM single polarization (112 Gb/s) signals based on four-wave mixing in a dispersion engineered silicon nanowire (SNW). Wavelength conversion covering the entire C-band is achieved using a single pump. We characterize the performance of the wavelength converter subsystem through the electrical signal to noise ratio penalty as well as the bit error rate of the converted signal as a function of input signal power. Moreover, we evaluate the degradation of the optical signal to noise ratio due to wavelength conversion in the SNW.

Theoretical and experimental investigation of direct detection optical OFDM transmission using beat interference cancellation receiver.

We theoretically and experimentally evaluate a beat interference cancellation receiver (BICR) for direct detection optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (DD-OFDM) systems that improves the spectral efficiency (SE) by reducing the guard band between the optical carrier and the optical OFDM signal while mitigating the impact of signal-signal mixing interference (SSMI). Experimental results show that the bit-error-rate (BER) is improved by about three orders of magnitude compared to the conventional receiver after 320 km single-mode fiber (SMF) transmission for 10 Gb/s data with a 4-QAM modulation using reduced guard band single-sideband OFDM (RSSB-OFDM) signal with 1.67 bits/s/Hz SE.