Digital Signal Processing for Optical Communications and Networks I: Linear Compensation

TL;DR

This paper reviews digital signal processing techniques for compensating transmission impairments in optical communication systems, emphasizing coherent detection and its role in enabling high-capacity, long-distance optical networks close to Shannon limits.

Contribution

It provides an overview of linear compensation methods using digital signal processing for mitigating impairments in optical fiber communications.

Findings

Effective mitigation of chromatic dispersion and nonlinearities.

Enhanced performance close to Shannon capacity.

Guidelines for real-time optical system design.

Abstract

The achievable information rates of optical communication networks have been widely increased over the past four decades with the introduction and development of optical amplifiers, coherent detection, advanced modulation formats, and digital signal processing techniques. These developments promoted the revolution of optical communication systems and the growth of Internet, towards the direction of high-capacity and long-distance transmissions. The performance of long-haul high-capacity optical fiber communication systems is significantly degraded by transmission impairments, such as chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion, laser phase noise and Kerr fiber nonlinearities. With the entire capture of the amplitude and phase of the signals using coherent optical detection, the powerful compensation and effective mitigation of the transmission impairments can be implemented using the digital signal processing in electrical domain. This becomes one of the most promising techniques for next-generation optical communication networks to achieve a performance close to the Shannon capacity limit. This chapter will focus on the introduction and investigation of digital signal processing employed for channel impairments compensation based on the coherent detection of optical signals, to provide a roadmap for the design and implementation of realtime optical fiber communication systems.