Electrical Mitigation of Penalties Caused by Group Delay Ripples for Different Modulation Formats

Electrical equalizers are proposed to mitigate the distortions caused by group delay ripples (GDRs) of cascaded optical filters (e.g., fiber Bragg gratings for chromatic dispersion (CD) compensation). Different electrical equalizers including feedforward equalizer (FFE), decision-feedback equalizer (DFE), nonlinear FFE-DFE, and maximum-likelihood sequence estimator are investigated and compared comprehensively for four different modulation formats: ON-OFF keying, optical duobinary, optical single sideband, and differential phase-shift keying. Especially, we find that the relationship of electrical equalization performance on the modulation format is very similar for the mitigation of GDR and CD.