Recent Progress and Fundamental Limitations of Optical MLSE Receivers

Recent experiments have proved MLSE receivers to be capable of supporting uncompensated transmission over standard fiber exceeding 1,000 km at 10 Gb/s, using only one sample per bit. In addition, both theoretical and experimental results show that MLSE can quite effectively mitigate dispersion and intra-channel non-linearity (such as SPM) together. Finally, reduced-state techniques are being proposed potentially allowing a quite substantial reduction of the MLSE processor complexity. In this talk, these aspects are going to be reviewed and MLSE limitations discussed. In addition, system scenarios where MLSE appears to be advantageous will be outlined.