Minimum BER criterion for electrical equalizer in optical communication systems

The electrical equalizer (EE) for dispersion compensation is a key and cost-effective element in optical communication OOK systems in the presence of a chromatic dispersion The most common but suboptimal optimization criterion for the EE weights is based on minimizing the mean square error (mse). Here, the authors examine the optimal optimization criterion, minimum bit error rate (MBER) for a feedforward equalizer (FFE) weights in optical communication systems. A BER performance comparison analysis shows that the MBER optimization criterion introduces improvements over the conventional minimum mse optimization criterion. In addition, the authors introduce a new simplified method for computing the FFE weights using the concept of decision boundary.