Abstract
Digital back-propagation (DBP) has recently been proposed for the comprehensive compensation of channel nonlinearities in optical communication systems. While DBP is attractive for its flexibility and performance, it poses significant challenges in terms of computational complexity. Alternatively, phase conjugation or spectral inversion has previously been employed to mitigate nonlinear fibre impairments. Though spectral inversion is relatively straightforward to implement in optical or electrical domain, it requires precise positioning and symmetrised link power profile in order to avail the full benefit. In this paper, we directly compare ideal and low-precision single-channel DBP with single-channel spectral-inversion both with and without symmetry correction via dispersive chirping. We demonstrate that for all the dispersion maps studied, spectral inversion approaches the performance of ideal DBP with 40 steps per span and exceeds the performance of electronic dispersion compensation by ~3.5 dB in Q-factor, enabling up to 96% reduction in complexity in terms of required DBP stages, relative to low precision one step per span based DBP. For maps where quasi-phase matching is a significant issue, spectral inversion significantly outperforms ideal DBP by ~3 dB.
Highlights
Recent trends in optical communication are focusing on high bit-rates as well as spectrally efficient transmission systems in order to cope with the demands of capacity growth [1]
Note that we considered a high number of samples per symbol to enable high Digital back-propagation (DBP) precision; it has been shown previously that similar performance may be achieved with only 2 samples/symbol [24]
This is a practical approach for next-generation multi-rate networks, since optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) requirements for low bit-rate channels are low; and lower launch power
Summary
Recent trends in optical communication are focusing on high bit-rates as well as spectrally efficient transmission systems in order to cope with the demands of capacity growth [1]. The ability to deploy a dynamic and configurable optical layer is a direct consequence of such developments This is true for shorter links across the network, where the improved optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) would allow the use of a high capacity channel. While such dynamic multi-rate networks enable flexible capacity allocation, these systems present complex trade-offs. We demonstrate that for a dispersion map facilitating the suppression of fibre nonlinearity, SI outperforms even ideal high-precision DBP To our knowledge, this is the first comparative report on the transmission performance of multiprecision digital back-propagation, and conventional and pre-chirped optical phase conjugation, employing multi-rate 28 Gbaud WDM transmissions with advanced modulation formats
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