Optical communication networks (OCNs) provide promising and cost-effective support for the ultra-fast broadband solutions, thus enabling them to address the ever growing demands of telecommunication industry such as high capacity and end users’ data rate. OCNs are used in both wired and wireless access networks as they offer many advantages over conventional copper wire transmission such as low power consumption, low cost, ultra-high bandwidth, and high transmission rates. Channel effects caused by light propagation through the fiber limits the performance, hence the data rate of the overall transmission. To achieve the maximum performance gain in terms of transmission rate through the OCN, an optical downlink system is investigated in this paper using feed forward equalizer (FFE) along with decision feedback equalizer (DFE). The simulation results show that the proposed technique plays a key role in dispersion mitigation in multi-channel optical transmission to uphold multi-Gb/s transmission. Moreover, bit error rate (BER) and quality factor (Q-factor) below ${10}^{-5}$ and above 5, respectively, are achieved with electrical domain equalizers for the OCN in the presence of multiple distortion effects showing the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive equalization techniques.

The impact of major nonlinearities in optical fiber such as SRR (Stimulated Raman Scattering) and Four Wave Maxing (FWM) in cascaded amplifier Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing optical long reach and high speed data rate transmission scheme have been investigated at different data rates. Pulse walk off effect is considered for the purpose of calculating Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) nonlinear factor. Examination has been accomplished to assess signal to noise ratio thinking about the consolidated impact of SRS and FWM within the sight of amplified spontaneous emission noise to achieve minutest noise at altered data rates.

Next-generation cloud radio access networks (C-RANs) are anticipated to provide multi-Gbps data rate transmission and ultra-high bandwidth capacity, which is one of the key performance indicators for future mobile networks. The integral layout of fiber optics and radio network manages the capabilities of the C-RAN, but needs to be optimized in terms of cost, reliability and further scalibility. For C-RAN architectures, Radio over Fiber (RoF) transport-based fronthaul is a promising candidate but the associated issues of distortions due to nonlinear impairments (NLIs) from power amplifier, linear distortions (LDs) due to modulating lasers and high peak to average power ratio (PAPR) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals need to be addressed. This work investigates these performance limiting factors and presents a DSP receiver-based solution to mitigate the effects of NLIs, LDs and high PAPR. Simulations are performed by applying a various range of transmission input powers, different quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats for the OFDM signal, optimized filtering at the receiver end and varying channel spacing among the optical WDM channels to analyze the performance of the proposed receiver under different conditions. The simulations and theoretical model of the proposed case studies verify that the presented solution for the RoF transport utilize less power, performs better for longer transmission distances, supports higher modulation formats and transports large number of WDM channels in the presence of NLIs and DLs as compared to the conventional RoF approach. With compensation of NLIs and LDs, transmission distance up to 10 km is investigated using 16 WDM channels with aggregate data rate of 100 Gb/s which shows that the proposed receiver can be used for future C-RAN fronthaul networks.