Harnessing machine learning for fiber-induced nonlinearity mitigation in long-haul coherent optical OFDM

© 2018 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) has attracted a lot of interest in optical fiber communications due to its simplified digital signal processing (DSP) units, high spectral-efficiency, flexibility, and tolerance to linear impairments. However, CO-OFDM’s high peak-to-average power ratio imposes high vulnerability to fiber-induced non-linearities. DSP-based machine learning has been considered as a promising approach for fiber non-linearity compensation without sacrificing computational complexity. In this paper, we review the existing machine learning approaches for CO-OFDM in a common framework and review the progress in this area with a focus on practical aspects and comparison with benchmark DSP solutions.Peer reviewe

Machine learning for fiber nonlinearity mitigation in long-haul coherent optical transmission systems

Fiber nonlinearities from Kerr effect are considered as major constraints for enhancing the transmission capacity in current optical transmission systems. Digital nonlinearity compensation techniques such as digital backpropagation can perform well but require high computing resources. Machine learning can provide a low complexity capability especially for high-dimensional classification problems. Recently several supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques have been investigated in the field of fiber nonlinearity mitigation. This paper offers a brief review of the principles, performance and complexity of these machine learning approaches in the application of nonlinearity mitigation

Semi-blind adaptive spatial equalisation for MIMO systems with high-order QAM signalling

This contribution investigates semi-blind adaptive spatial filtering or equalisation for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems that employ high-throughput quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signalling. A minimum number of training symbols, equal to the number of receivers (we assume that the number of transmitters is no more than that of receivers), are first utilized to provide a rough least squares channel estimate of the system's MIMO channel matrix for the initialization of the spatial equalizers' weight vectors. A constant modulus algorithm aided soft decision-directed blind algorithm, originally derived for blind equalization of single-input single-output and single-input multiple-output systems employing high-order QAM signalling, is then extended to adapt the spatial equalizers for MIMO systems. This semi-blind scheme has a low computational complexity, and our simulation results demonstrate that it converges fast to the minimum mean-square-error spatial equalization solution

Bacterial Foraging Based Channel Equalizers

A channel equalizer is one of the most important subsystems in any digital communication receiver. It is also the subsystem that consumes maximum computation time in the receiver. Traditionally maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) was the most popular form of equalizer. Owing to non-stationary characteristics of the communication channel MLSE receivers perform poorly. Under these circumstances ‘Maximum A-posteriori Probability (MAP)’ receivers also called Bayesian receivers perform better. Natural selection tends to eliminate animals with poor “foraging strategies” and favor the propagation of genes of those animals that have successful foraging strategies since they are more likely to enjoy reproductive success. After many generations, poor foraging strategies are either eliminated or shaped into good ones (redesigned). Logically, such evolutionary principles have led scientists in the field of “foraging theory” to hypothesize that it is appropriate to model the activity of foraging as an optimization process. This thesis presents an investigation on design of bacterial foraging based channel equalizer for digital communication. Extensive simulation studies shows that the performance of the proposed receiver is close to optimal receiver for variety of channel conditions. The proposed receiver also provides near optimal performance when channel suffers from nonlinearities

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThis dissertation deals with blind modulation identification of quadrature amplitude modulations (QAM) and phase-shift keying (PSK) signals in dual-polarized channels in digital communication systems. The problems addressed in this dissertation are as follows: First, blind modulation identification of QAM and PSK signals in single noisy channels and multipath channels are explored. Second, methods for blind separation of two information streams in a dual-polarized channel and identification of the modulation types of the two information streams are developed. A likelihood-based blind modulation identification for QAM and PSK signals in a single channel with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) is developed first. This algorithm selects the modulation type that maximizes a log-likelihood function based on the known probability distribution associated with the phase or amplitude of the received signals for the candidate modulation types. The approach of this paper does not need prior knowledge of carrier frequency or baud rate. Comparisons of theory and simulation demonstrate good agreement in the probability of successful modulation identification under different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). Simulation results show that for the signals in AWGN channels containing 10000 symbols and 20 samples per symbol, the system can identify BPSK, QPSK, 8PSK and QAMs of order 16, 32, 64, 128 and 256 with better than 99% accuracy at 4 dB SNR. Under the same condition, the simulation results indicate the two competing methods available in the literature can only reach at most 85% accuracy even at 20 dB SNR for all the modulation types. The simulation results also suggest that when the symbol length decreases, the system needs higher SNRs in order to get accurate identification results. Simulations using different noisy environments indicate that the algorithm is robust to variations of noise environments from the models assumed for derivation of the algorithm. In addition, the combination of a constant modulus amplitude (CMA) equalizer and the likelihood-based modulation identification algorithm is able to identify the QAM signals in multipath channels in a wide range of SNRs. When compared with the results for the signals in AWGN channels, the combination of the CMA equalizer and the likelihood-based modulation identification algorithm needs higher SNRs and longer signal lengths in order to obtain accurate identification results. The second contribution of this dissertation is a new method for blindly identifying PSK and QAM signals in dual-polarized channels. The system combines a likelihood-based adaptive blind source separation (BSS) method and the likelihood-based blind modulation identification method. The BSS algorithm is based on the likelihood functions of the amplitude of the transmitted signals. This system tracks the time-varying polarization coefficients and recovers the input signals to the two channels. The simulation results presented in this paper demonstrate that the likelihood-based adaptive BSS method is able to recover the source signals of different modulation types for a wide range of input SNRs. Comparisons with a natural gradient-based BSS algorithm indicate that the likelihood-based method results in smaller symbol error rates. When a modulation identification algorithm is applied to the separated signals, the overall system is able to identify different PSK and QAM signals with high accuracy at sufficiently high SNRs. For example, with 20,000 symbols, the system identified BPSK and 16-QAM signals with better than 99% accuracy when the input SNR was 8dB and the polarization coefficients rotated with a rate of 1.3 ms. Higher SNRs are needed to obtain similar levels of accuracy when the polarization changes faster or when the number of input symbols is shorter. When compared with the identification results for signals in AWGN channels, the system needs higher SNRs and longer signal length to obtain accurate results for signals in dual-polarized channels

Affinity propagation clustering for blind nonlinearity compensation in coherent optical OFDM

The first blind nonlinear equalizer using affinity propagation (AP) clustering is experimentally demonstrated for single-channel and WDM CO-OFDM. AP outperforms fuzzylogic c-means clustering and digital-back propagation for both QPSK and 16-QAM formats