Comparison of linear and nonlinear equalization for ultra-high capacity spectral superchannels

In ultra-high-speed (>400Gb/s per wavelength), high-spectral efficiency coherent optical communication systems using multi-carrier spectral superchannels, the maximum reach is severely limited due to linear and, foremost, nonlinear impairments. Hence, the implementation of advanced digital signal processing (DSP) techniques in optical transceivers is crucial for alleviating the impact of such impairments. However, the DSP performance improvement comes at the expense of increased cost and power consumption. Given that the computational complexity of the applied linear and nonlinear equalizers is the factor that determines the trade-off between the performance improvement and cost, in this study we provide an extended analysis on the computational complexity of various linear and nonlinear equalization approaches. First, we draw a complexity comparison between a conventional OFDM coherent receiver versus a filter-bank based OFDM receiver and it is shown that the latter provides significant complexity savings. Second, we present a comparison between the digital back-propagation split-step Fourier (DBP-SSF) method and the inverse Volterra series transfer function nonlinear equalizer (IVSTF-NLE) in terms of performance and computational complexity for a 32 Gbaud polarization multiplexed (PM)-16 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) OFDM superchannel.