Driven primarily by cloud service and data-center applications, short-reach optical communication has become a key market segment and growing research area in recent years. Short-reach systems are characterized by direct detection-based receiver configurations and other low-cost and small form factor components that induce transmission impairments unforeseen in their coherent counterparts. Innovative signaling and digital signal processing (DSP) play a pivotal role in enabling these components to realize their ultimate potentials and meet data rate requirements in cost-effective manners. This paper presents an overview of recent DSP developments for short-reach communications systems and discusses future trends.

Advanced modulation formats combined with digital signal processing and direct detection is a promising way to realize high capacity, low cost and power efficient short reach optical transmission system. In this paper, we present a detailed investigation on the performance of three advanced modulation formats for 100 Gb/s short reach transmission system. They are PAM-4, CAP-16 and DMT. The detailed digital signal processing required for each modulation format is presented. Comprehensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of each modulation format in terms of received optical power, transmitter bandwidth, relative intensity noise and thermal noise. The performance of each modulation format is also experimentally studied. To the best of our knowledge, we report the first demonstration of a 112 Gb/s transmission over 10km of SSMF employing single band CAP-16 with EML. Finally, a comparison of computational complexity of DSP for the three formats is presented.

We experimentally demonstrate the use of deep neural networks (DNNs) in combination with signals’ amplitude histograms (AHs) for simultaneous optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) monitoring and modulation format identification (MFI) in digital coherent receivers. The proposed technique automatically extracts OSNR and modulation format dependent features of AHs, obtained after constant modulus algorithm (CMA) equalization, and exploits them for the joint estimation of these parameters. Experimental results for 112 Gbps polarization-multiplexed (PM) quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), 112 Gbps PM 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM), and 240 Gbps PM 64-QAM signals demonstrate OSNR monitoring with mean estimation errors of 1.2 dB, 0.4 dB, and 1 dB, respectively. Similarly, the results for MFI show 100% identification accuracy for all three modulation formats. The proposed technique applies deep machine learning algorithms inside standard digital coherent receiver and does not require any additional hardware. Therefore, it is attractive for cost-effective multi-parameter estimation in next-generation elastic optical networks (EONs).

We experimentally demonstrated 140-Gb/s transmission over 20-km standard single-mode fiber employing pulse-amplitude modulation (PAM)-4 and direct detection (DD) at 1.3 μm. DD faster than Nyquist is employed to compensate for channel impairments. The optimal length of taps of decision directed least mean square and the optimal tap coefficient for digital postfilter are investigated. A receiver sensitivity of -5.5 dBm at bit error rate of 3.8× 10 ^-3 is realized for 140-Gb/s PAM-4 signal after 20-km transmission. To the best of our knowledge, this is the highest reported baud rate (70 GBd) of direct detected PAM-4 signal and the highest per channel bit rate with single polarization and DD for short reach communications.

In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate single channel 128Gbit/s and four lanes transmission with a total capacity of 500Gbit/s for short reach applications employing PAM4 format and direct detection with commercial 25Gbps devices.

Polarization-division-multiplexed (PDM) four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) with coherent detection is a promising low cost solution for 80 km inter-datacenter transmissions at 100 Gb/s and beyond. In this paper, three modified adaptive equalization algorithms for the PDM-PAM4 optical coherent systems, i.e. signal-phase aid least-mean-square (SP-LMS) algorithm, training multi-modulus algorithm (TMMA) and cascaded four-modulus algorithm (CMMA-4), are proposed and compared. Based on the proposed algorithms, 112 Gb/s PDM-PAM4 transmission over 80 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) in C-band for a bit error rate (BER) below 3.8e-3 is successfully demonstrated without optical amplifier, chromatic dispersion (CD) pre-compensation and extra carrier recovery operations.