Per-symbol-based digital back-propagation approach for PDM-CO-OFDM transmission systems.

For polarization-division-multiplexing coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (PDM-CO-OFDM) systems, we propose a per-symbol-based digital back-propagation (DBP) approach which, after cyclic prefix removal, conducts DBP for each OFDM symbol. Compared with previous DBP, this new proposal avoids the use of inefficient overlap-and-add operation and saves one fast Fourier transform (FFT) module, therefore simplifying the hardware implementation. Transmitting a 16-QAM, 42.8-Gb/s PDM-CO-OFDM signal over 960-km standard single mode fiber (SSMF), we compare the previous and the proposed DBP approaches with different receiver's sampling rates and different step lengths in each DBP iteration, and found that the proposed DBP can achieve a similar performance as that of the previous DBP while enjoying a simpler implementation. We have also specifically introduced a small self-phase modulation (SPM) model for DBP and demonstrated its feasibility with the same experimental setup.