Abstract
The advent of silica-based low-cost standard single-mode fibers revolutionized the whole communication industry. The deployment of optical fibers in the networks induces a paradigm shift in the communication technologies used for long-haul information transfer. However, the communication using the optical fibers is affected by several linear and nonlinear effects. The most common linear effects are attenuation and chromatic dispersion, whereas the dominant nonlinear effect is the Kerr effect. The Kerr effect induces a power-dependent nonlinear distortion for the signal propagating in the optical fiber. The detrimental effects of the Kerr nonlinearity limit the capacity of long-haul optical communication systems. Fiber Kerr nonlinearity compensation using digital signal processing (DSP) techniques has been well investigated over several years. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive tutorial, including the fundamental mathematical analysis, on the characteristics of the optical fiber channel, the origin of the Kerr nonlinearity effect, the theory of the pulse propagation in the optical fiber, and the numerical and analytical tools for solving the pulse propagation equation. In addition, we provide a concise review of various DSP techniques for fiber nonlinearity compensation, such as digital back-propagation, Volterra series-based nonlinearity equalization, perturbation theory-based nonlinearity compensation, and phase conjugation. We also carry out numerical simulation and the complexity evaluation of the selected nonlinearity compensation techniques.
Highlights
We provide a comprehensive description of the characteristics of the optical fiber channel, the theory behind the origin of the Kerr effect, the development of the pulse propagation equation, the numerical and analytical tools used for solving the pulse propagation equation, and various Kerr-induced nonlinearity effects in the optical fiber channel
The results indicate that the MOD-16QAM-conjugate data repetition (CDR)/MOD-16-quadrature amplitude modulated (QAM)-phase-conjugated twin wave (PCTW) techniques show considerable Q-factor improvement in the nonlinear regime without using pre-EDC when compared to the phase-conjugated subcarrier coding (PCSC) technique, which shows negligible performance improvement in this scenario [57]
Using the classical electron oscillator model, we have explained the origin of the nonlinear susceptibility and the Kerr effect in a silica-based optical fiber
Summary
The superchannel technique has several benefits over the single-carrier systems [16] It has lower requirements in terms of optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) and analog-to-digital converters/digital-to-analog converters bandwidth [16]. It is noteworthy that there are various optical and electrical techniques available to combat the adverse effect of the CD in a long-haul optical communication system [17,18,19,20,21] Another significant impairment that limits the transmission performance of the long-haul optical communication system is the fiber nonlinearity [7]. The transmission performance of the single-channel optical communication systems is mainly limited by the intra-channel Kerr nonlinearity effect.
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