A Survey on Machine Learning for Optical Communication [Machine Learning View]

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of machine learning applications in optical communication, emphasizing the ML perspective to help researchers understand the current landscape and identify research gaps in this emerging field.

Contribution

It is the first survey to review ML for optical communication from the ML viewpoint, offering a broad overview of existing algorithms and applications in this domain.

Findings

Many ML algorithms are yet to be applied in optical communication.

The field is rapidly evolving with many unexplored applications.

The survey covers more investigations than previous reviews.

Abstract

Machine Learning (ML) for Optical Communication (OC) is certainly a hot topic emerged recently and will continue to raise interest at least for the next few years. The rate of research development in this area is growing very rapidly. Novelty of this research direction resides mainly in the peculiarity of the application field, rather than in the methodological approaches, which are (at least up to now) state-of-the-art ML algorithms. Reviewing the literature shows that many of the ML algorithms have not yet been used in this area, and many of the OC applications are not considered yet, which reflects the fact that the research topic is pristine. Accordingly, tutorial investigations are quiet necessary in this filed to help researchers be aware about the last progressions and cavities of this field. Although several tutorials have been released recently, they considered this topic from OC view, and neglected ML view. However, it is required to have an investigations about the ML algorithms used in this subject. Accordingly, for the first time, this paper reviews ML for OC literature from ML viewpoint. This view could be really helpful because only OC experts work on ML for OC, and they are not ML experts, so it could really help them to have a comprehensive view on the ML subjects implantable in OC. It has worth to mention that compared with other works, this survey reviews much more investigations; therefore, it has more generality, and gives the reader to have a comprehensive overview on this topic.