Performance of MLSE Receiver in a Dispersion-Managed Multispan Experiment at 10.7 Gb/s Under Nonlinear Transmission

We report the first comparison of the performance of a maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) receiver with that of a standard threshold receiver in a dispersion-managed eight-span transmission experiment at 10.7 Gb/s in the presence of fiber nonlinearities. We find a loss of performance advantage of the MLSE receiver for compensating fiber chromatic dispersion under highly nonlinear transmission conditions