Robust Digital Signal Recovery for LEO Satellite Communications Subject to High SNR Variation and Transmitter Memory Effects

This paper proposes a robust digital signal recovery (DSR) technique to tackle the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) variation and transmitter memory effects for broadband power efficient down-link in next-generation low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite constellations. The robustness against low SNR is achieved by concurrently integrating magnitude normalization and noise feature filtering using a filtering block built with one batch normalization (BN) layer and two bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) layers. Moreover, unlike existing deep neural network-based DSR techniques (DNN-DSR), which failed to effectively take into account the memory effects of radio-frequency power amplifiers (RF-PAs) in the model design, the proposed BiLSTM-DSR technique can extracts the sequential characteristics of the adjacent in-phase (I) and quadrature (Q) samples, and hence can obtain superior memory effects compensation compared with the DNN-DSR technique. Experimental validation results of the proposed BiLSTM-DSR with a 100 MHz bandwidth OFDM signal demonstrate an excellent performance of 11.83 dB and 9.4% improvement for adjacent channel power ratio (ACPR) and error vector magnitude (EVM), respectively. BiLSTM-DSR also outperforms the existing DNN-DSR technique in terms of the ACPR and EVM by 2.4 dB and 0.9%, which provides a promising solution for developing deep learning-assisted receivers for high-throughput LEO satellite networks

Deep Learning Methods for Nonlinearity Mitigation in Coherent Fiber-Optic Communication Links

Nowadays, the demand for telecommunication services is rapidly growing. To meet this everincreasing connectivity demand telecommunication industry needs to maintain the exponential growth of capacity supply. One of the central efforts in this initiative is directed towards coherent fiber-optic communication systems, the backbone of modern telecommunication infrastructure. Nonlinear distortions, i.e., the ones dependent on the transmitted signal, are widely considered to be one of the major limiting factors of these systems. When mitigating these distortions, we can’t rely on the pre-recorded information about channel properties, which is often missing or incorrect, and, therefore, have to resort to adaptive mitigation techniques, learning the link properties by themselves. Unfortunately, the existing practical approaches are suboptimal: they assume weak nonlinear distortion and propose its compensation via a cascade of separately trained sub-optimal algorithms. Deep learning, a subclass of machine learning very popular nowadays, proposes a way to address these problems. First, deep learning solutions can approximate well an arbitrary nonlinear function without making any prior assumptions about it. Second, deep learning solutions can effectively optimize a cluster of single-purpose algorithms, which leads them to a global performance optimum. In this thesis, two deep-learning solutions for nonlinearity mitigation in high-baudrate coherent fiber-optic communication links are proposed. The first one is the data augmentation technique for improving the training of supervised-learned algorithms for the compensation of nonlinear distortion. Data augmentation encircles a set of approaches for enhancing the size and the quality of training datasets so that they can lead us to better supervised learned models. This thesis shows that specially designed data augmentation techniques can be a very efficient tool for the development of powerful supervised-learned nonlinearity compensation algorithms. In various testcases studied both numerically and experimentally, the suggested augmentation is shown to lead to the reduction of up to 6× in the size of the dataset required to achieve the desired performance and a nearly 2× reduction in the training complexity of a nonlinearity compensation algorithm. The proposed approach is generic and can be applied to enhance a multitude of supervised-learned nonlinearity compensation techniques. The second one is the end-to-end learning procedure enabling optimization of the joint probabilistic and geometric shaping of symbol sequences. In a general end-to-end learning approach, the whole system is implemented as a single trainable NN from bits-in to bits-out. The novelty of the proposed approach is in using cost-effective channel model based on the perturbation theory and the refined symbol probabilities training procedure. The learned constellation shaping demonstrates a considerable mutual information gains in single-channel 64 GBd transmission through both single-span 170 km and multi-span 30x80 km single-mode fiber links. The suggested end-to-end learning procedure is applicable to an arbitrary coherent fiber-optic communication link