Optik 124 (2013) 7173

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Optik
journal homepage: www.elsevier.de/ijleo

Adaptive bre nonlinearity precompensation based on optical performance

monitoring in coherent optical OFDM transmission systems
L.X. Hou a,b, , Q. Shi a,b , Y.M. Lu c , D. Liu a,b
a
b
c

Research Institute of Highway Ministry of Transport, Beijing 100088, China

Research Institute of Highway (RIOH) Transport Consultants Ltd, Beijing 100088, China
Key Laboratory of Trustworthy Distributed Computing and Service, Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 13 June 2011
Accepted 12 November 2011

OCIS:
(060.1660) Coherent communications
(060.2330) Fibre optics communications

a b s t r a c t
This paper forces on the monitoring and compensation of optical telecommunication channels. An adaptive bre nonlinearity precompensation (AFNP) scheme is proposed to solve the bre nonlinearity in
coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexed networks (CO-OFDM). Optical performance
monitoring (OPM) at end-terminals is applied to channel identication in this paper. It is considered to
be high efciency and a cost efcient technique in low-dynamic system.
2011 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Fibre nonlinearity
Coherent optical orthogonal frequency
division multiplexed networks
Optical performance monitoring
Precompensation

1. Introduction
Coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexed
networks (CO-OFDM) transmission technique has gained much
interest in the eld of optical bre communication recently [16].
It is a serious contender for the future optical bre transmission
systems because it effectively removes the inter-symbol interference from chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode
dispersion (PMD) [2]. This system can apply exible digital signal processing algorithm to compensate the chromatic dispersion,
mitiganting the urge for precise optical chromatic dispersion compensation and reducing the cost of the system construction and
operation. Its unique advantage has become prominent in highspeed and long-haul optical bre transmissions. However, there is
limitation on the performance in this system. The major reason for
such limitation originates from the nonlinearity impairment (such
as SPM (self-phase modulation), XPM (cross-phase modulation),
FWM (Four-wave-mixing) and so on) in the optical bre. Due to
compact distribution of sub-carriers, it is more severe than that in
the traditional system.

Corresponding author. Tel.: +86 1082010916; fax: +86 1062370155.

E-mail address: lancyhou@gmail.com (L.X. Hou).
0030-4026/$ see front matter 2011 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijleo.2011.11.045

Non-linear bre effects should be mitiganted if the optical

powers are kept low [7]. However, low powers require frequent
reamplication to maintain a sufcient signal-to-noise ratio.
Although, it is useful to try to mitigate bre nonlinearity, the number of optical ampliers could also contribute impairment at the
same time. Fibre nonlinearity compensation was rst proposed
using materials with a negative nonlinear coefcient [8], which is
impracticable. Recently, electronic dispersion compensation (EDC)
is becoming an attractive technology for dispersion nonlinearity
compensation in optical links [5,6,9], where the system is modelled but with inverse parameters for dispersion and nonlinear
coefcients. However, detailed information of the dispersion map
and optical power levels along the path is required. Computation
becomes extensive for real-time implementation in high-dynamic
system.
This paper presents a optical performance monitor (OPM) [10]
to estimate nonlinearities compensation. In order to identify the
level of non-linearity, we propose to apply a spectrum estimation
of a representative linear system and an equivalent noise spectrum
for the non-linear distortion contribution. Simple signal processing at the transmitter can be used to implement compensation,
and this processing require asynchronous monitoring information
from OPM, so it tentatively does not work over a wide range of
high-dynamic systems because of OPM processing capacity. The
computation cost that used for dispersion compensation is the

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L.X. Hou et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 7173

Fig. 1. Description of CO-OFDM transmission system with OPM.

Fourier transforms in OFDM. To avoid overload computation in

compensation implement, we select Freeway Private Optical Network (FPON) as simulation object. In which, service is gathering
type basically and detailed knowledge of the dispersion map can
be obtained more easily.
2. Precompensation algorithm
The OPM can monitor the optical power of each WDM channel,
and estimate the OSNR by interpolating the ASE level aside of the
signal. In this scheme, the pilot tones technology is used to monitor
various optical parameters of signals. It can be extremely costeffective, because this can monitor without using the expensive
de-multiplexing lters (such as tuneable optical lter and diffraction grating) and it is also well suited for the use in dynamic optical
networks. Fig. 1 depicts the investigated CO-OFDM transmission
system. Two independent baseband signals modulate the orthogonally polarized parts of the TX signal. Pilot tones are located at
predetermined positions for optical modulator and they carry a
xed, in both magnitude and phase, symbol (known at the receiver).
At the receiver, the OPM coherent detection is deployed. The transmitter allows any optical amplitude and phase to be transmitted
along the link. The modulator produces a single-sideband optical
spectrum with a totally suppressed carrier. At the OFDM transmitter, modulated symbols send by an inverse discrete Fourier
transform (IDFT) before further processing and transmission. At the
receiver, the signal is sampled and given to DFT computation.
As the sampled spectra of the TX and RX signals represent by
the sub-carriers of OFDM symbols, the calculations can be directly
carried out on a number of OFDM symbols which are known to the
receiver. Obviously a certain number of preamble symbols have to
be transmitted; alternatively one can think of analysis of data after
equalization and decision. Our proposed monitoring technique in
OPM is based on a system identication approach which describes
the optical transmission path.
An ensemble of corresponding signal spectra X(f) and Y(f) which
are derived by Fourier transform leads to the linear transfer function. The criterion of minimum power of the noise-like signal
should be used for the estimate of the linear transfer function computation. And the spectral power density of nonlinearity could also
be estimated by another averaging process over the ensemble of
input and output spectra. nn (f) is the expectation who measure
for non-linearity distortions.





E{Y (f ) X (f )}


nn (f ) = E Y (f )

2 X(f )


E{X(f ) }

along with actual additive noise (power: Nl ). And we can extract

the wanted ratios Nnl /S and Nl /S using further computation.
The OFDM precompensation method proposed here uses the
low walk-off to an advantage because the transmission path has
low Chromatic Dispersion which can be approximated compensation when calculating the effects of bre nonlinearity [11]. Because
bre dispersion mitigates the effect of nonlinearity because of
some walk-off, the effective length for precompensation will be less
than its dispersionless value [12]. Actually a single rectication is
required for the entire nonlinear computation.
To represent bre nonlinearity, the following revised calculation
applies a phase advance, (t) in proportion to the instantaneous
optical power P(t), that is input to the rst bre span [13]
(t) =

P(t) sLeff 2n2

(0 Aeff ) 0

where s is the number of bre spans, Leff is an effective length of

each bre span for nonlinearity compensation, n2 is a nonlinearity coefcient, 0 is the wavelength of the carrier, and Aeff is the
effective core area of the bre, 0 is the phase adjustment of CD.
The phase adjustment of CD can be obtained by solving nonlinear Schrdinger equations. Thus, now equation reads:
0 = 0 +

c
2
fLD

Dt f 2

D

d=1

nn (d)

2
D  E{Y (d)X (d)}


X(d)


d=1
E{|X(d)|2 }

(1)

(2)

In the following, an estimate of nn (f) comprises two contributions: a noise-like signal due to non-linear effects of power Nnl

(4)

where fLD is the centre frequency of laser, Dt denotes dispersion

parameters and 0 is the phase shift according to centre frequency.
This offset for compensation could be estimated at the receiver,
where the instantaneous optical power is proportional to the
square of the sum of the elds of the subcarriers, as would be
detected by a photodiode. More conveniently, it can be sent to
transmitter and applied in the electrical domain using a bank of
hardware multipliers just after the inverse fast Fourier transform
(FFT). These will adjust the phase of each time sample in proportion
to its magnitude squared, as its magnitude squared modulates the
optical power, so it is implemented.

We integrate over the used frequency band, and work with signal powers rather than spectral power densities over the discrete
sub-carriers d:
N
=
S

(3)

Fig. 2. The Freeway Private Optical Network (FPON) topology.

L.X. Hou et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 7173

73

for poor extinction ratios), OFDM has a 1.6-dB advantage over AFDN
at all OSNRs. Plots of the variance of the symbols for OSNRs up to
20 dB suggest that a BER oor does not occur for OFDM.
In Fig. 4, we compare the performance among the three schemes
under various trafc of services using the FPON. The blocking probability (BP) denotes the effectivity for each scheme. The gure shows
that the BP without AFNP are higer than those two schemes unless
under heavy trafc load (700 Erlang). Actually, on this occasion,
processing capacity is the biggest bottleneck in AFNP. The system
with AFNP also performs similar to back to back under low trafc
load, and even under middle, it still remains 99% restoration probability in 600 Erlang. The service of FPON in normal use actually is
the just one who has low-dynamic and high stability feature.

Fig. 3. BER versus SNR in single link.

4. Conclusions
In this paper, we have shown that the CO-OFDM network is
extended for the adaptive bre nonlinearity precompensation to
deal with optical impairments from nonlinearity. The AFNP extends
an OPM module to monitor the optical power and identify system
compensation. Simulation shows that the AFNP achieves better
performance under low-dynamic. Therefore, the AFNP is a suitable nonlinearity precompensation system in specied CO-OFDM
networks.
Acknowledgement
This research was supported by The National Basic Research
(973) Program of China (No. 2011CB302702), The National 863
Program (No. 2011AA01A205).

Fig. 4. Blocking probability under various networks load.

3. Simulation results
In this section, we evaluate the AFNP using the FPON topology.
In order to achieve a realistic network load, lightpath provisioning
requests are dynamically generated according to a Poison process
and uniformly distributed among the source-destination pairs. The
data rate is 10 Gb/s and the block length is 1024 bits, giving D = 128
sub-carriers of OFDM symbols in an optical bandwidth of 5 GHz
with 4-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). Each link comprises number of uncompensated 80-km spans. The bre has a loss
of 0.2 dB/km, a nonlinearity coefcient, n2 , of 2.6 1020 m2 /W, and
an effective cross section of 80 m2 . The optical ampliers compensate for the 16-dB bre loss in each span, and have a noise gure
(NF) of 6 dB. The output power of each amplier is controlled to set
the input power to each 80-km bre span. The coherent receiver
used a 10-mW local oscillator laser and is noiseless (Fig. 2).
Fig. 3 plots BER versus SNR for both systems in the 4000-km
single link (from Urumchi to Beijing) and back to back system. For
a BER of 10-3 (which can be improved by Forward-Error Correction
coding), the AFND system requires a 3 dB better SNR. This advantage
of OFDM over AFDN reduces to zero for lower BERs, but only if
the AFDN systems threshold is optimized to take advantage of the
low variance of the zero-bits for high extinction ratios. If the AFDN
threshold is placed midway between the 1 and 0 levels (as it would

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