Successive Interference Cancellation on Frequency-Selective Channels With Mode-Dependent Gain

In ultra-long-haul optical communication systems, polarization-dependent gain from single-mode semiconductor optical amplifiers or mode-dependent gain from multi-mode erbium-doped fiber amplifiers causes a channel’s achievable information rate (AIR) using linear minimum-mean-square error (MMSE) detection to become substantially lower than the capacity of optimal maximum likelihood detection owing to loss of orthogonality between modes. However, such capacity loss can be mitigated using techniques that retain reasonable complexity, such as successive interference cancellation (SIC). In wireless systems, multicarrier transmission with many subcarriers transforms the frequency-selective channel into a set of uncoupled memoryless subchannels, and it is possible to obtain good performance using SIC on each subchannel independently. Multicarrier transmission in optical fibers, however, is susceptible to performance loss caused by Kerr nonlinearity. Therefore, we study methods for applying SIC on frequency-selective optical fiber channels using single-carrier transmission. We compare the theoretical performance of MMSE and SIC equalizers on frequency-selective optical fiber channels operating at 64 Gbaud with transmission distances up to 15,000 km and evaluate the penalties of SIC implementation. We consider single-mode fiber links with random artificial polarization-mode dispersion inserted along the link to enhance frequency diversity, as well as multi-core fiber links supporting 14 spatial and polarization modes. We show that SIC can increase outage capacity by 19%, but the AIR increase is reduced by almost half if error correction coding is not performed across modes. We confirm that SIC can adapt to fast channel perturbations with only a 3% decrease in AIR.