Soft Electrical Equalization for Optical Channels

Optical channels are limited in terms of data rate and fiber length due fiber non-linearity, chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion. Electrical equalization is an attractive way to combat these forms of non-linear dispersion. With the advent of powerful error-correcting codes, equalizers must be able to work in an iterative fashion by exchanging soft information with the decoder. We will compare two such soft equalizers, the forward-backward equalizer and the Monte Carlo equalizer, and evaluate their performance.