Digital Compensation of Intercarrier Nonlinear Distortion With Carrier Phase Locking

Compensating for intercarrier nonlinear distortion allows launching higher power into the transmission fiber and it leads to an increase in the transmission distance. Numerical calculations show that the launch power is increased by 10 dB and the maximum transmission distance is more than tripled, when the optical repeater spacing of 80 km, dispersion-shifted fiber, and signal format of 10 Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero are assumed. It is experimentally demonstrated that waveform distortion due to the four-wave mixing (FWM) among different carriers in wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) becomes deterministic by phase-locking optical carriers and that FWM distortion can be compensated at 5 Gb/s with three-channel condition by employing DSP at the transmitter or receiver.