Electronic dispersion compensation of fiber links using sparsity induced volterra equalizers

During the last few years, a lot of research has been invested for the development of electronic devices equipped with advanced signal processing techniques for the dispersion compensation of Optical transmission systems. Compared to their all-optical counterparts, electronic compensation increases flexibility and gives a new impetus to transparent optical networks for adaptive and dynamic handling in cases where the total accumulated dispersion is not known in advance. In this paper, the Sparse Learning via Iterative Minimization (SLIM) algorithm is employed for the design of reduced size Volterra Decision Feedback (VDFE) equalizers in the context of optical communications is considered. The equalizer structure is dynamically tuned discarding coefficients that have a marginal contribution to the performance of the equalizer leading to both enhanced convergence speed and significant computational complexity savings.