Adaptive Turbo Equalization for Nonlinearity Compensation in WDM Systems

In this paper, the performance of adaptive turbo equalization for nonlinearity compensation (NLC) is investigated. A turbo equalization scheme is proposed where a recursive least-squares (RLS) algorithm is used as an adaptive channel estimator to track the time-varying intersymbol interference (ISI) coefficients associated with inter-channel nonlinear interference (NLI) model. The estimated channel coefficients are used by a MIMO 2 x 2 soft-input soft-output (SISO) linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) equalizer to compensate for the time-varying ISI. The SISO LMMSE equalizer and the SISO forward error correction (FEC) decoder exchange extrinsic information in every turbo iteration, allowing the receiver to improve the performance of the channel estimation and the equalization, achieving lower bit-error-rate (BER) values. The proposed scheme is investigated for polarization multiplexed 64QAM and 256QAM, although it applies to any proper modulation format. Extensive numerical results are presented. It is shown that the scheme allows up to 0.7 dB extra gain in effectively received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and up to 0.2 bits/symbol/pol in generalized mutual information (GMI), on top of the gain provided by single-channel digital backpropagation.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the performance of adaptive turbo equalization for nonlinearity compensation, proposing a scheme utilizing a recursive least-squares algorithm for adaptive channel estimation. By exchanging extrinsic information in every turbo iteration, the receiver is able to improve the performance of channel estimation and equalization, achieving lower bit-error-rate values. The proposed scheme allows for additional gains in signal-to-noise ratio and mutual information beyond what single-channel digital backpropagation can provide.