Evaluation of correlated digital back propagation and extended Kalman filtering for non-linear mitigation in PM-16-QAM WDM systems

Abstract

We investigate the individual and combined performance of correlated digital back propagation (CDBP) and extended Kalman filtering (EKF) in mitigating inter and intra-channel non-linearities in wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) systems. The afore-mentioned algorithms are verified through numerical simulations on 28 Gbaud polarization multiplexed (PM) 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) 9-channel WDM system with 50 GHz spacing. A single channel CDBP with one-step-per-span based on asymmetric split step Fourier method (A-SSFM) with optimized non-linear coefficient has been employed. We also study an amplitude dependent optimization (AO) of the non-linear coefficient for CDBP which shows an improvement of ≈ 0.8 dB compared to the conventional optimized CDBP, in the non-linear regime. Moreover, our proposed carrier phase and amplitude noise estimation (CPANE) algorithm based on EKF outperforms AO-CDBP in both linear and non-linear regimes with an enhanced performance besides significantly reduced complexity. We further investigate the combined performance of AO-CDBP and EKF which results in an enhanced non-linear tolerance at the expense of increased computational cost trading off to the number of required CDBP steps per span. Furthermore, we also analyze the impact of cross phase modulation (XPM) on the combined performance of AO-CDBP and EKF by varying the number of WDM channels. Numerical results show that the obtained gain from employing AO-CDBP prior to EKF reduces with increasing effects of XPM. Additionally, we also discuss the computational complexity of the aforementioned algorithms.