SSBI Mitigation and the Kramers–Kronig Scheme in Single-Sideband Direct-Detection Transmission With Receiver-Based Electronic Dispersion Compensation

The performance of direct-detection transceivers employing electronic dispersion compensation combined with DSP-based receiver linearization techniques is assessed through experiments on a 4 × 112 Gb/s wavelength-division multiplexing direct-detection single-sideband 16 quadratic-amplitude modulation Nyquist-subcarrier-modulation system operating at a net optical information spectral density of 2.8 b/s/Hz in transmission over standard single mode fiber links of up to 240 km. The experimental results indicate that systems with receiver-based dispersion compensation can achieve similar performance to those utilizing transmitter-based dispersion compensation, provided it is implemented together with an effective digital receiver linearization technique. The use of receiver-based compensation would simplify the operation of a fiber link since knowledge of the link dispersion is not required at the transmitter. The recently proposed Kramers-Kronig receiver scheme was found to be the best performing among the receiver linearization techniques assessed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental demonstration of the Kramers-Kronig scheme.