Sparse Volterra model based on optical single side-band NPAM-4 direct-detection system

Signal-to-signal beating interference (SSBI) is one of the main drawbacks in direct-detection based optical transmission systems. Volterra filter is a common equalization method to mitigate the nonlinear distortion. However, the computational complexity may be unacceptable as the transmission capacity increases. In this paper, we propose a sparse Volterra model combining the feed forward equalization (FFE) and higher order terms of a modified Volterra filter with Schmidt orthogonal searching to mitigate the linear and nonlinear interference and reduce the complexity significantly in an optical single-side band (SSB) Nyquist pulse-shaped four-level pulse amplitude (NPAM-4) system. The experimental results show that the sparse Volterra filter and full Volterra filter have comparable performance, but the former only needs half kernels of the latter.