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