Complexity-reduced digital nonlinear compensation for coherent optical systems

The high complexity of conventional intra-channel nonlinearity compensation algorithms, such as back-propagation, is considered as the major obstacle for the implementation. To reduce the complexity, perturbation analysis is applied because it considers multi-span transmission as one stage. In those perturbation based algorithms, such as perturbation back-propagation (PBP) and perturbation pre-distortion, the number of required compensation stage is much less than that of conventional back-propagation. To reduce the complexity further, the multi-tap finite impulse response filter (FIR) in PBP is replaced with one-tap infinite impulse response (IIR) filter. The number of required compensation stage of IIR PBP is only 15% of conventional back-propagation, whereas the complexity of each stage is almost same. In perturbation pre-distortion, the proposed perturbation combination reduces the number of terms from 19732 to 41, whereas no performance degradation is observed.