Low Complexity Volterra Equalizer for Terahertz Radio-over-Fiber Communication Systems

High-speed terahertz (THz) communication systems face challenges in transmission performance due to both linear and nonlinear impairments. While Volterra nonlinear equalizer (VNLE) significantly enhances the performance of high-speed THz signals, its extensive computational complexity hinders practical implementation. In response, we present and experimentally validate a pruned Volterra nonlinear equalizer (PVNLE). Our approach involves identifying and eliminating insignificant weight coefficients from the second-order VNLE, effectively mitigating computational complexity while maintaining equalizer performance. Compared to the traditional VNLE, our proposed method demonstrates similar performance in terms of bit error rate (BER) with a noteworthy 70% reduction in computational complexity.