Joint Statistics and MLSD in Filtered Incoherent High-Speed Fiber-Optic Communications

In this paper, signal statistics and their utilization for detection in narrowly filtered equalized high-speed fiber-optic communications are investigated experimentally. Tradeoffs between log-likelihood metric applications and oversampling are covered in detail. It is, for the first time, demonstrated that performance loss in bandwidth-limited systems can be nearly fully recovered (to within 0.5 dB) by taking advantage of bandwidth-limitation-induced noise correlations and oversampling.