Advanced DSP for 400Gb/s and beyond Optical Networks

This paper presents a systematic review of several digital signal processing (DSP)-enabled technologies recently proposed and demonstrated for high spectral efficiency (SE) 400Gb/s – class and beyond optical networks. These include 1) a newly proposed SE-adaptable optical modulation technology ⎯ time-domain hybrid quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), 2) two advanced transmitter side digital spectral shaping technologies ⎯ Nyquist signaling (for spectrally-efficient multiplexing) and digital pre-equalization (for improving tolerance toward channel narrowing effects), and 3) a newly proposed training-assisted two-stage carrier phase recovery algorithm that is designed to address the detrimental cyclic phase slipping problem with minimal training overhead. Additionally, this paper presents a novel DSP-based method for mitigation of equalizer-enhanced phase noise impairments. It is shown that performance degradation caused by the interaction between the long-memory chromatic dispersion (CD) compensating filter/equalizer and local oscillator (LO) laser phase noise can be effectively mitigated by replacing the commonly used fast single-tap phase-rotation-based equalizer (for typical carrier phase recovery) with a fast multi-tap linear equalizer. Finally, brief reviews of two high-SE 400Gb/s-class WDM transmission experiments employing these advanced DSP algorithms are presented.

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