Electrical equalization for advanced optical communication systems

We investigate equalizers for electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) of dispersion limited optical fibre communication links in combination with different modulation formats. We show that the performance of conventional equalizers including feedforward equalizer (FFE) and decision feedback equalizer (DFE) are fundamentally limited by the nonlinearity of square-law detection of the photodiode in direct detection systems. Advanced modulation formats such as differential phase shift keying (DPSK) and optical duobinary further enhance this kind of nonlinearity and degrade further FFE/DFE performance. However, nonlinear FFE–DFE and maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) take into account the mitigation of nonlinear inter symbol interference (ISI) and hence can achieve much better performance. We show that in contrast to other modulation formats, optical single sideband modulation results in approximately linear distortions after detection and thus a simple linear FFE equalizer can achieve good compensation.