An Overview on Application of Machine Learning Techniques in Optical Networks

Today's telecommunication networks have become sources of enormous amounts of widely heterogeneous data. This information can be retrieved from network traffic traces, network alarms, signal quality indicators, users' behavioral data, etc. Advanced mathematical tools are required to extract meaningful information from these data and take decisions pertaining to the proper functioning of the networks from the network-generated data. Among these mathematical tools, Machine Learning (ML) is regarded as one of the most promising methodological approaches to perform network-data analysis and enable automated network self-configuration and fault management. The adoption of ML techniques in the field of optical communication networks is motivated by the unprecedented growth of network complexity faced by optical networks in the last few years. Such complexity increase is due to the introduction of a huge number of adjustable and interdependent system parameters (e.g., routing configurations, modulation format, symbol rate, coding schemes, etc.) that are enabled by the usage of coherent transmission/reception technologies, advanced digital signal processing and compensation of nonlinear effects in optical fiber propagation. In this paper we provide an overview of the application of ML to optical communications and networking. We classify and survey relevant literature dealing with the topic, and we also provide an introductory tutorial on ML for researchers and practitioners interested in this field. Although a good number of research papers have recently appeared, the application of ML to optical networks is still in its infancy: to stimulate further work in this area, we conclude the paper proposing new possible research directions

Digital communication receivers using Gaussian processes for machine learning

We propose Gaussian processes (GPs) as a novel nonlinear receiver for digital communication systems. The GPs framework can be used to solve both classification (GPC) and regression (GPR) problems. The minimum mean squared error solution is the expectation of the transmitted symbol given the information at the receiver, which is a nonlinear function of the received symbols for discrete inputs. GPR can be presented as a nonlinear MMSE estimator and thus capable of achieving optimal performance from MMSE viewpoint. Also, the design of digital communication receivers can be viewed as a detection problem, for which GPC is specially suited as it assigns posterior probabilities to each transmitted symbol. We explore the suitability of GPs as nonlinear digital communication receivers. GPs are Bayesian machine learning tools that formulates a likelihood function for its hyperparameters, which can then be set optimally. GPs outperform state-of-the-art nonlinear machine learning approaches that prespecify their hyperparameters or rely on cross validation. We illustrate the advantages of GPs as digital communication receivers for linear and nonlinear channel models for short training sequences and compare them to state-of-the-art nonlinear machine learning tools, such as support vector machines

Optoelectronic Reservoir Computing

Reservoir computing is a recently introduced, highly efficient bio-inspired approach for processing time dependent data. The basic scheme of reservoir computing consists of a non linear recurrent dynamical system coupled to a single input layer and a single output layer. Within these constraints many implementations are possible. Here we report an opto-electronic implementation of reservoir computing based on a recently proposed architecture consisting of a single non linear node and a delay line. Our implementation is sufficiently fast for real time information processing. We illustrate its performance on tasks of practical importance such as nonlinear channel equalization and speech recognition, and obtain results comparable to state of the art digital implementations.Comment: Contains main paper and two Supplementary Material

Iterative pre-distortion of the non-linear satellite channel

Digital Video Broadcasting - Satellite - Second Generation (DVB-S2) is the current European standard for satellite broadcast and broadband communications. It relies on high order modulations up to 32-amplitude/phase-shift-keying (APSK) in order to increase the system spectral efficiency. Unfortunately, as the modulation order increases, the receiver becomes more sensitive to physical layer impairments, and notably to the distortions induced by the power amplifier and the channelizing filters aboard the satellite. Pre-distortion of the non-linear satellite channel has been studied for many years. However, the performance of existing pre-distortion algorithms generally becomes poor when high-order modulations are used on a non-linear channel with a long memory. In this paper, we investigate a new iterative method that pre-distorts blocks of transmitted symbols so as to minimize the Euclidian distance between the transmitted and received symbols. We also propose approximations to relax the pre-distorter complexity while keeping its performance acceptable

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