EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATION OF MITIGATION OF LINEAR AND NONLINEAR IMPAIRMENTS IN FIBER-OPTIC COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS BY LDPC-CODED TURBO EQUALIZATION

Abstract

The ever-increasing demands for transmission capacity are the cause for the quick evolution of optical communication systems. Channel transmission at 100 Gb/s is already being considered by network operators. The major transmission impairments at these high rates are intra-channel and inter-channel nonlinearities, nonlinear phase noise, and polarization mode dispersion. By implementing LDPC-coded modulation schemes with soft decoding and Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) algorithm for equalization we have demonstrated significant improvements in system performance experiencing several impairments simultaneously. The new turbo-equalization scheme is used as a mean to simultaneously mitigate both linear and nonlinear impairments. This approach is general and applicable to both direct and coherent detection.We provide comprehensive study of LDPC codes suitable for implementation in high-speed optical transmission systems. We determine channel capacity based on the forward step of the BCJR algorithm and show that by using LDPC codes we can closely approach the maximum transmission capacity that is possible. We propose the multilevel maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) turbo equalization scheme based on multilevel BCJR algorithm and an LDPC decoder, which considers independent symbols transmitted over both polarizations as two dimensional super-symbols. The use of multilevel modulation schemes provide higher spectral efficiency, while all related signal processing is performed at lower symbol rates, where dealing with PMD compensation and fiber nonlinearities mitigation is more manageable. We show significant improvement in system performance over a system employing an equalizer that considers symbols transmitted in different polarizations as independent.