Narrowband nonlinear frequency division multiplexing system based on Hermite–Gaussian-carriers

Abstract

Nonlinear frequency division multiplexing (NFDM) is a promising technique for optical fiber communication that can overcome the Kerr nonlinear effects of optical fibers. Hermite–Gaussian (HG)-carriers are a potential candidate for constructing the nonlinear spectrum in NFDM systems, as they have lower time–bandwidth product and higher tolerance to truncation noise than conventional sinc-carriers. However, HG-carriers are affected by interference and truncation error between subcarriers, which degrade the system performance. In this paper, we propose a HG-carriers reconstruction method based on Gram–Schmidt Orthogonalization, which can effectively restore the orthogonality between subcarriers and reduce the distortion. Through a numerical simulation, we explore the use of HG-carriers and sinc-carriers to construct the nonlinear spectrum, and analyze their performance differences under different system bandwidth parameters. We also implement HG-carriers in a narrowband (6.8 GHz) b-modulation dual-polarization NFDM system and optimize them to achieve a maximum spectral efficiency (SE) of 8.89 bits/s/Hz (4.44 bits/s/Hz per polarization) over 960 km with bit error rate (BER) below the hard decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold. Our results demonstrate that HG-carriers outperform sinc-carriers in narrowband NFDM systems, and that our proposed HG-carriers reconstruction method can significantly improve the Q-factor and SE.