Improved single channel backpropagation for intra-channel fiber nonlinearity compensation in long-haul optical communication systems

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Abstract
Backpropagation has been shown to be the most effective method for compensating intra-channel fiber nonlinearity in long-haul optical communications systems. However, effective compensation is computationally expensive, as it requires numerous steps and possibly increased sampling rates compared with the baud rate. This makes backpropagation difficult to implement in real-time. We propose: (i) low-pass filtering the compensation signal (the intensity waveform used to calculate the nonlinearity compensation) in each backpropagation step and (ii) optimizing the position of the nonlinear section in each step. With numerical simulations, we show that these modifications to backpropagation improve system performance, reducing the number of backpropagation steps and reducing the oversampling for a given system performance. Using our ‘filtered backpropagation’, with four backpropagation steps operating at the same sampling rate as that required for linear equalizers, the Q at the optimal launch power was improved by 2 dB and 1.6 dB for single wavelength CO-OFDM and CO-QPSK systems, respectively, in a 3200 km (40 × 80km) single-mode fiber link, with no optical dispersion compensation. With previously proposed backpropagation methods, 40 steps were required to achieve an equivalent performance. A doubling in the sampling rate of the OFDM system was also required. We estimate this is a reduction in computational complexity by a factor of around ten.