Assessment of Intra-channel Fiber Nonlinearity Compensation in 200 GBaud and Beyond Coherent Optical Transmission Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate and assess the performance of intra-channel nonlinearity compensation (IC-NLC) in long-haul coherent optical transmission systems with a symbol rate of 200 GBaud and beyond. We first evaluate the potential gain of ideal IC-NLC in 4 THz systems by estimating the proportion of self-channel interference (SCI) using the split-step Fourier method (SSFM) based simulation with either lumped amplification or distributed amplification. As the symbol rate increases to 300 GBaud, the SCI proportion exceeds 65%. On the other hand, the non-deterministic polarization mode dispersion (PMD) will impact the effectiveness of IC-NLC, especially for ultra-high symbol rate systems. Therefore, we investigate the power spectral density of the residual nonlinear noise after ideal IC-NLC in the presence of PMD. The results indicate that the gain of ideal digital backpropagation (IDBP) decreases by 3.85 dB in 300 GBaud erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA)-amplified links with a PMD parameter of 0.05 ps/km1/2, and 5.09 dB in distributed Raman amplifier (DRA)-amplified links. Finally, we evaluate the potential gains of practical IC-NLC in C-band wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) systems by employing the low-pass-filter assisted digital backpropagation (LDBP). As the symbol rate increases from 100 GBaud to 300 GBaud, the gain of 20-step-per-span (20-stps) LDBP increases from 0.53 dB to 0.87 dB for EDFA-amplified links, and from 0.89 dB to 1.30 dB for DRA-amplified links. Our quantitative results show that for 200 GBaud and beyond systems, there is a sizable gain to achieve by compensating for intra-channel nonlinearity even with a large non-deterministic PMD.