Digital backpropagation based on binary logarithmic step size distribution for fibre non-linearity compensation

Capacity crunch has become critical in recent years as commercial communication systems approach their theoretical data rate limits. This work presents a low-complexity digital backpropagation (DBP) implementation approach based on step size distribution that uses a binary logarithmic step size method to achieve high data rate optical transmission. The proposed scheme shows performance improvements (∆Q) of 2.36, 1.19, and 0.71 dB over linear compensation, constant step size (CSS) DBP, and logarithmic step size DBP techniques in a 2400 km 112 Gbit/s DP-16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) system, respectively. At 13 dBm, a high performance (Q) of 10.9 dB (BER = \(2.25\times10^4\)) is achieved, above the \(3.80 \times 10^3\) hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) limit, using the proposed scheme. Also, the allowable transmission distance is extended by 960 km at the HD-FEC limit over the linear compensation technique. The optimization achieves a 38% saving in the number of DBP calculation steps compared to the CSS DBP, which considerably reduces the computational cost since a few steps are required for effective non-linearity compensation.

Recommended citation: Dede, A., Akowuah, E.K. and Haxha, S., 2023. Digital backpropagation based on binary logarithmic step size distribution for fibre non‐linearity compensation. The Journal of Engineering, 2023(12), p.e12340.
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