Capacity of a nonlinear optical channel with finite memory
Journal article, 2014

The channel capacity of a nonlinear, dispersive fiber-optic link is revisited. To this end, the popular Gaussian noise (GN) model is extended with a parameter to account for the finite memory of realistic fiber channels. This finite-memory model is harder to analyze mathematically but, in contrast to previous models, it is valid also for nonstationary or heavy-tailed input signals. For uncoded transmission and standard modulation formats, the new model gives the same results as the regular GN model when the memory of the channel is about ten symbols or more. These results confirm previous results that the GN model is accurate for uncoded transmission. However, when coding is considered, the results obtained using the finite-memory model are very different from those obtained by previous models, even when the channel memory is large. In particular, the peaky behavior of the channel capacity, which has been reported for numerous nonlinear channel models, appears to be an artifact of applying models derived for independent input in a coded (i.e., dependent) scenario. © 1983-2012 IEEE.

Author

Erik Agrell

Chalmers, Signals and Systems, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Alex Alvarado

University College London (UCL)

University of Cambridge

Giuseppe Durisi

Chalmers, Signals and Systems, Communication, Antennas and Optical Networks

Magnus Karlsson

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Journal of Lightwave Technology

0733-8724 (ISSN) 1558-2213 (eISSN)

Vol. 32 16 2862-2876 6824164

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Telecommunications

Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1109/JLT.2014.2328518

More information

Latest update

5/2/2018 7