All-optical Signal Processing of Fiber Impairments in Dual-Polarization 112 Gbit/s m-ary QAM Coherent Transmission

We have numerically implemented a receiver side all-optical signal processing method, i.e. optical backward propagation (OBP), by dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) and non-linear compensator (NLC) devised by effective negative Kerr non-linear coefficient using two highly non-linear fibers (HNLFs). The method is implemented for the post-processing of fiber transmission impairments, i.e. chromatic dispersion (CD) and non-linearities (NL). The OBP module is evaluated for dual-polarization (DP) m-ary (m=4,16,32,64,256) quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) in 112 Gbit/s coherent transmission over 1200 km standard single mode fiber (SMF). We have also investigated an intensity limited optical backward propagation module (IL-OBP) by using a self-phase modulation-based optical limiter with an appropriate pre-chirping to compensate for the intensity fluctuations in the transmission link. Our results show that in highly non-linear sensitive 256QAM transmission, we have observed a 66% increase in the transmission distance by implementing IL-OBP as compared to conventional OBP.