HERMITIAN SYMMETRY BASED FIBER NON-LINEARITY COMPENSATION IN OPTICAL OFDM NETWORKS

Abstract

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technique which is now used in most new and emerging broadband wired and wireless communication systems such as standard 802.11a/b/g/n, Digital Video Broad casting Television (DVB-TV), and Long Term Evolution (LTE) in the next mobile generation, due to its capacity in solving the problems of Inter-Symbol Interference (ISI) caused by the effects of the dispersive channel. Very recently researches focus on applying OFDM technology in optical fiber communication systems. Optical OFDM is well suited for high speed transmission systems with high spectral efficiency and attracted significant attention from the optical communication community. One of the major issues that degrade the performance of optical OFDM networks is its fiber non-linearity. Fiber non-linearities represent the fundamental limiting mechanisms to the amount of data that can be transmitted on a single optical fiber. Non-linear effects arise as optical fiber data rates, transmission lengths, number of wavelengths, and optical power level increases. Therefore, the effect of non-linearity in high data rate optical networks needs to be controlled to enhance link performances. In this paper, a nonlinearity compensation technique (Hermitian Symmetry) is implemented to improve the performance of OFDM based optical networks. This would provide high spectral efficiency, low ISI and very good Bit Error Rate (BER) performances without increasing the complexity of the network. The optical OFDM transmission system with fiber non-linearity compensation is simulated using Virtual Photonics Integrated (VPI) software.