An improved neural network-based equalization method is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The up-to-137 Gb/s transmission of four level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-4) signals with 25 G class 850 nm optical devices is achieved over an in-house fabricated 40 cm optical backplane. An in-depth investigation is conducted regarding the impact of delayed taps and spans on equalization performance. A performance comparison of the proposed method with the traditional maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) and decision feedback equalization (DFE) is also undertaken. For the bit rate from 80 to 100 Gb/s, the proposed method achieves an adopted hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) requirement at a received optical power (RoP) of −9 and −8 dBm, while DFE and MLSE cannot meet the HD-FEC requirement. When the bit rate increases from 120 to 137 Gb/s, the proposed equalization method still successfully maintains the acceptable system performance at an RoP of −4 and −2.5 dBm. Furthermore, the specific bit error rate (BER) performances for varied maximum achievable bit rate under different RoPs by applying MLSE and the proposed method are also analyzed. This provides an important potential solution to realize the future data centers.

In this study, a joint modulation format identification and optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) monitoring algorithm is proposed and experimentally demonstrated using the k-nearest neighbor algorithm for intensity modulation and direct detection (IMDD) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. A modified amplitude histogram of received signal is employed to serve as the classification feature to simplify the computation. Experimental results show that five common quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) modulation formats, including 4-QAM, 16-QAM, 32-QAM, 64-QAM and 128-QAM, can be identified under 100% accurate estimation at the received optical power of −11 dBm. Robustness of the proposed scheme to constellation rotation is also experimentally assessed. At the same time, system OSNR monitoring also can be achieved and the average prediction mean square error (MSE) is 0.69 dB², which is similar to that using an artificial neural network. Computational complexity assessment demonstrated that similar performance but less computing resource consumption can be achieved by using the proposed scheme rather than the artificial neural network-based scheme.