Low complexity digital backpropagation for high baud subcarrier-multiplexing systems

Abstract

In this paper, we propose two modifications to reduce the complexity of the subcarrier-multiplexing (SCM) based digital backpropagation (DBP) for high symbol rate SCM systems. The first one is to reduce the number of interfering subcarriers (RS-SCM-DBP) when evaluating the cross-subcarrier nonlinearity (CSN). The second one is to replace the original frequency domain CSN filters with the infinite impulse response (IIR) filters (IIR-RS-SCM-DBP) in the CSN compensation. The performance of the proposed schemes are numerically evaluated in three-channel dual-polarization (DP) 16QAM wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmissions. The aggregate symbol rate for each channel is 120 GBaud and the transmission distance is 1600 km. For the SCM system with 16 subcarriers, the IIR-RS-SCM-DBP with only 4 interfering subcarriers and 2 steps can achieve a 0.3 dB Q-factor improvement in the WDM transmission. Compared to the original SCM-DBP, the proposed IIR-RS-SCM-DBP reduces the complexity by 48% at a performance loss of only 0.07 dB.