Nonlinearity compensation using dispersion-folded digital backward propagation.

A computationally efficient dispersion-folded (D-folded) digital backward propagation (DBP) method for nonlinearity compensation of dispersion-managed fiber links is proposed. At the optimum power level of long-haul fiber transmission, the optical waveform evolution along the fiber is dominated by the chromatic dispersion. The optical waveform and, consequently, the nonlinear behavior of the optical signal repeat at locations of identical accumulated dispersion. Hence the DBP steps can be folded according to the accumulated dispersion. Experimental results show that for 6,084 km single channel transmission, the D-folded DBP method reduces the computation by a factor of 43 with negligible penalty in performance. Simulation of inter-channel nonlinearity compensation for 13,000 km wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transmission shows that the D-folded DBP method can reduce the computation by a factor of 37.