Demodulation and Detection Schemes for a Memoryless Optical WDM Channel

It is well known that matched filtering and sampling (MFS) demodulation together with minimum Euclidean distance (MD) detection constitute the optimal receiver for the additive white Gaussian noise channel. However, for a general nonlinear transmission medium, MFS does not provide sufficient statistics, and therefore is suboptimal. Nonetheless, this receiver is widely used in optical systems, where the Kerr nonlinearity is the dominant impairment at high powers. In this paper, we consider a suite of receivers for a two-user channel subject to a type of nonlinear interference that occurs in wavelength-division-multiplexed channels. The asymptotes of the symbol error rate (SER) of the considered receivers at high powers are derived or bounded analytically. Moreover, Monte-Carlo simulations are conducted to evaluate the SER for all the receivers. Our results show that receivers that are based on MFS cannot achieve arbitrary low SERs, whereas the SER goes to zero as the power grows for the optimal receiver. Furthermore, we devise a heuristic demodulator, which together with the MD detector yields a receiver that is simpler than the optimal one and can achieve arbitrary low SERs. The SER performance of the proposed receivers is also evaluated for some single-span fiber-optical channels via split-step Fourier simulations

A survey on fiber nonlinearity compensation for 400 Gbps and beyond optical communication systems

Optical communication systems represent the backbone of modern communication networks. Since their deployment, different fiber technologies have been used to deal with optical fiber impairments such as dispersion-shifted fibers and dispersion-compensation fibers. In recent years, thanks to the introduction of coherent detection based systems, fiber impairments can be mitigated using digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms. Coherent systems are used in the current 100 Gbps wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) standard technology. They allow the increase of spectral efficiency by using multi-level modulation formats, and are combined with DSP techniques to combat the linear fiber distortions. In addition to linear impairments, the next generation 400 Gbps/1 Tbps WDM systems are also more affected by the fiber nonlinearity due to the Kerr effect. At high input power, the fiber nonlinear effects become more important and their compensation is required to improve the transmission performance. Several approaches have been proposed to deal with the fiber nonlinearity. In this paper, after a brief description of the Kerr-induced nonlinear effects, a survey on the fiber nonlinearity compensation (NLC) techniques is provided. We focus on the well-known NLC techniques and discuss their performance, as well as their implementation and complexity. An extension of the inter-subcarrier nonlinear interference canceler approach is also proposed. A performance evaluation of the well-known NLC techniques and the proposed approach is provided in the context of Nyquist and super-Nyquist superchannel systems.Comment: Accepted in the IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorial

Phase Modulation for Discrete-time Wiener Phase Noise Channels with Oversampling at High SNR

A discrete-time Wiener phase noise channel model is introduced in which multiple samples are available at the output for every input symbol. A lower bound on the capacity is developed. At high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), if the number of samples per symbol grows with the square root of the SNR, the capacity pre-log is at least 3/4. This is strictly greater than the capacity pre-log of the Wiener phase noise channel with only one sample per symbol, which is 1/2. It is shown that amplitude modulation achieves a pre-log of 1/2 while phase modulation achieves a pre-log of at least 1/4.Comment: To appear in ISIT 201

Digital signal processing for fiber nonlinearities [Invited]

This paper reviews digital signal processing techniques that compensate, mitigate, and exploit fiber nonlinearities in coherent optical fiber transmission systems