Multiplier-Free Intrachannel Nonlinearity Compensating Algorithm Operating at Symbol Rate

Intrachannel nonlinearity is considered a major distortion in high-capacity transmission systems particular for the case without inline optical chromatic dispersion compensation. In this paper, a low-complexity intrachannel nonlinear compensator operating at the symbol rate is proposed based on the nonlinear perturbation predistortion for the dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift keying (DP-QPSK) systems. Compared with the widely studied backpropagation algorithm, the proposed algorithm achieves comparable performance with significantly reduced complexity and halved sampling speed in digital signal processing and digital-to-analog converters. The proposed algorithm is demonstrated in a 43 Gb/s DP-QPSK transmission experiment over 1500 km. In addition to the experimental demonstration, numerical simulation verifies that the proposed algorithm is quite robust by tolerating significant uncertainties of link parameters and span-by-span inhomogeneity in the links.