Mitigation of Pattern Sensitivity in Full-Field Electronic Dispersion Compensation

We investigate the pattern-dependent decoding failures in full-field electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) by off-line processing of experimental signals, and find that the performance of such an EDC receiver may be degraded by an isolated ldquo1rdquo bit surrounded by long strings of consecutive ldquo0srdquo. By reducing the probability of occurrence of this kind of isolated ldquo1rdquo and using a novel adaptive threshold decoding method, we greatly improve the compensation performance to achieve 10-Gb/s on-off keyed signal transmission over 496-km field-installed single-mode fiber without optical dispersion compensation.