Electronic equalization in optical fiber communications

Electronic equalizers, which have been used widely in wireless and wireline communications, have recently been recognized as effective solutions for mitigating the impairments in the optical communications channel as well. Now with the increasing availability of voltage-tunable integrated circuits for high speed operation, equalizers, in particular those based on the minimum mean-square error (MMSE) criterion have emerged as practical and cost-effective solutions. Certain properties of the optical domain, however, are different than other communications systems where these equalizers have been used. We study the effects of these properties on the performance of the MMSE equalizers through eigenanalysis of the input autocorrelation matrix.