Low-complexity clustered polynomial nonlinear filter-based electrical dispersion pre-compensation scheme in IM/DD transmission systems

A polynomial nonlinear filter (PNLF)-based electrical dispersion pre-compensation (pre-EDC) scheme assisted with Gerchberg-Saxton (GS) algorithm is proposed to compensate the chromatic dispersion (CD) for intensity-modulation and direct-detection (IM/DD) optical transmission systems, where PNLF is utilized to fit the nonlinear transfer function of the iterative GS algorithm-based pre-EDC scheme to realize a low-complexity non-iterative CD pre-compensation. The capability of PNLF to fit the nonlinear iterative process enables the PNLF-based pre-EDC scheme to compensate for CD-induced linear distortions and address CD-induced nonlinear distortions, which are typically captured through iterative approaches. Additionally, to further reduce the computational complexity, we also introduce the k-means clustering algorithm to eliminate the weight redundancy and propose a lower-complexity clustered PNLF-based pre-EDC scheme. Simulation results show that PNLF-based and clustered PNLF-based pre-EDC schemes save 76.0% and 97.5% complexity with only 0.3 dB receiver sensitivity penalty at 20% forward error correction (FEC) threshold, compared with GS-based pre-EDC scheme in C-band 56 GBaud 80-km on-off keying (OOK) system. Furthermore, the effectiveness of PNLF-based and clustered PNLF-based pre-EDC schemes is also evaluated through the experimental demonstration. Experimental results show that under C-band 32 GBaud 80-km OOK system, bit error ratio (BER) satisfying 20% FEC threshold is achieved by applying PNLF-based and clustered PNLF-based pre-EDC schemes, which save 78.3% and 94.2% complexity with only 0.4 dB receiver sensitivity penalty compared with GS-based pre-EDC scheme, respectively. The research results indicate that the (clustered) PNLF-based pre-EDC scheme has the great application potential for CD compensation in high-performance and low-cost IM/DD optical transmission systems.(c) 2023 Optica Publishing Group under the terms of the Optica Open Access Publishing Agreement