Folded digital backward propagation for dispersion-managed fiber-optic transmission

In periodically dispersion managed long-haul transmission systems, waveform distortion is dominated by chromatic dispersion. As a result of the periodic waveform evolution, the nonlinear behavior also repeats itself in every dispersion period. It is shown that, under the weakly nonlinear assumption, nonlinear effects accumulated in a large number (K) of spans can be approximated by nonlinear effects accumulated in a single span with the same dispersion map and K times the nonlinearity. Thus, significant savings in computational load can be achieved in digital compensation of fiber nonlinearity using folded digital backward propagation (DBP). Simulation results show that the required computation for DBP of dispersion managed transoceanic transmission systems can be reduced by up to 2 orders of magnitude with negligible penalty using folded DBP.