Improving Soliton Transmission Systems through Soliton Interactions

Gai Zhou, Tao Gui, Chao Lu, Alan Pak Tao Lau, Ping Kong Alexander Wai

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

36 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Nonlinear interactions between neighboring pulses has always been a fundamental bottleneck in soliton transmission systems. Recently, coherent transceivers, digital signal processing (DSP) and the new nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT) theoretical framework has revived and generalized the field of soliton transmissions into nonlinear frequency division multiplexing (NFDM). We hereby demonstrate analytically and experimentally that one can considerably improve soliton transmission performance by intentionally allowing neighboring solitons to interact and collide during propagation and exchange positions at the receiver followed by standard NFT processing. This can be achieved by designing neighboring solitons' eigenvalues λ to have opposite signs in the real part while the magnitude |Re(λ)| is optimized for a given transmission distance so that neighboring transmitted pulses would have swapped their timing positions at the receiver. Experimental results for 6.13 Gbaud 1-soliton systems demonstrate a transmission reach improvement of 100% for 16APSK and 60% for 8PSK modulated on the b-coefficients. The proposed scheme eliminated a long-standing fundamental limitation in soliton transmissions, opened up new dimensions in transmitter signal design and receiver signal processing for nonlinear optical communication systems.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8784170
Pages (from-to)3563-3572
Number of pages10
JournalJournal of Lightwave Technology
Volume38
Issue number14
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Jul 2020

Keywords

  • Nonlinear Fourier transform
  • Optical communications

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Improving Soliton Transmission Systems through Soliton Interactions'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this