Electronic distortion compensation in the mitigation of optical transmission impairments

The key design approaches and results in the. field of compensation of optical impairment distortion by electronic means, as an outcome of the studies and research innovations developed within the joint project on mitigation of optical transmission impairments by electronic means work group of the ePhoton/ONe+ European project are presented. The research topics addressed are related to chromatic and polarisation mode dispersion, with particular reference to feed-forward/decision-feedback equaliser and maximum-likelihood sequence estimation-based equalisers as well as pre-distortion schemes. Additionally, the use of electronic compensation in metro/access applications is examined with reference to studies related to the performance enhancement of directly modulated laser transmitters, the compensation of the square-law characteristics of receivers and the equalisation of multi-level format schemes.