Adaptive Equalization for Dispersion Mitigation in Multi-Channel Optical Communication Networks

Abstract

Optical communication networks (OCNs) provide promising and cost-effective support for the ultra-fast broadband solutions, thus enabling them to address the ever growing demands of telecommunication industry such as high capacity and end users’ data rate. OCNs are used in both wired and wireless access networks as they offer many advantages over conventional copper wire transmission such as low power consumption, low cost, ultra-high bandwidth, and high transmission rates. Channel effects caused by light propagation through the fiber limits the performance, hence the data rate of the overall transmission. To achieve the maximum performance gain in terms of transmission rate through the OCN, an optical downlink system is investigated in this paper using feed forward equalizer (FFE) along with decision feedback equalizer (DFE). The simulation results show that the proposed technique plays a key role in dispersion mitigation in multi-channel optical transmission to uphold multi-Gb/s transmission. Moreover, bit error rate (BER) and quality factor (Q-factor) below 10 − 5 and above 5, respectively, are achieved with electrical domain equalizers for the OCN in the presence of multiple distortion effects showing the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive equalization techniques.