Information Rates of Successive Interference Cancellation for Optical Fiber

Joint detection and decoding (JDD) achieves rates based on information theory but is too complex to implement for many channels with memory or nonlinearities. Successive interference cancellation (SIC) at the receiver, combined with multistage encoding at the transmitter, is a method that lets one use coded modulation for memoryless channels to approach JDD rates. A SIC-based receiver is presented to compensate for inter-channel interference in long-haul optical fiber links. Simulations for 1000 km of standard single-mode fiber with ideal distributed Raman amplification, single-polarization transmission, and circularly symmetric complex Gaussian (CSCG) modulation show that SIC attains the achievable information rates (AIRs) of JDD using surrogate channel models with correlated phase and additive noise (CPAN). Moreover, the AIRs of ring constellations are compared to those of CSCG modulation. Simulations show that 32 rings, 16 SIC-stages, and Gaussian message passing on the factor graph of the CPAN surrogate model achieve the JDD rates of CSCG modulation. The computational complexity scales in proportion to the number of SIC-stages, where one stage has complexity similar to separate detection and decoding.