6.4Tb/s SSB WDM Transmission Over 320km SSMF With Linear Network-Assisted LSTM

Single-sideband (SSB) signaling is a promising technology for short and medium reach optical transmission. We propose a novel architecture of linear network-assisted long short-term memory network (LN-LSTM) to mitigate optical transmission impairments in SSB systems. With a combination of a linear network and an input-pruned LSTM network, LN-LSTM achieves better performance and lower computation complexity compared with conventional LSTM equalization. With LN-LSTM, we achieve 6.4 Tb/s (32 x 200 Gb/s) wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) SSB transmission over 320km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) with a bit error rate (BER) below the 20% soft-decision forward error-correction (SD-FEC) threshold of 2.4 x 10(-2).