A Robust Adaptive Pre-Distortion Method for Optical Communication Transmitters

Present and next generation optical communication systems are constantly being developed to operate at higher baud rates and higher modulation formats. It then becomes inevitable to consider the various linear and nonlinear effects due to the imperfect components at the transmitter. State-of-the-art digital-to-analog converters, high bandwidth driver amplifiers, and dual-polarization (DP) Mach-Zehnder modulators are far from being ideal and present distortions in the form of bandwidth limitation, transmitter I/Q skew, and nonlinear effects. In this letter, we propose a new robust pre-distortion method to mitigate the undesirable linear and non-linear distortions of all electrical and optical transmitter components simultaneously. A step-by-step derivation and implementation of the algorithm are discussed and put forward. The performance of the algorithm is experimentally assessed across DP-4QAM, DP-8QAM, DP-16QAM, DP-32QAM, and DP-64QAM up to the signaling rates of 56 GBd. Significant improvements in the required optical signal-to-noise ratio at bit-error rate (BER) of 10^-2 are demonstrated.