Performance Evaluation of Highly Nonlinear Fiber (HNLF) Based Optical Phase Conjugation (OPC) in Long Haul Transmission of 640 Gbps 16-QAM CO-OFDM

This paper presents the quantitative measurement through an experimental test of 640 Gbps 16-QAM coherent-optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) over 800 km optical fiber with mid-link optical phase conjugation (OPC) using highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF). The first focus is the OPC parameter optimization, including the optimization of HNLF length and signal/pump power that inputs into OPC. Four different HNLFs, as the illustrative examples, are investigated. The second focus is to investigate the effects of fiber dispersion, nonlinearity, and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise on the long-haul transmission of 16-QAM CO-OFDM signal, and the OPC compensation efficiency. The performance evaluation focuses on the conversion efficiency (CE), received signal constellation, Q-factor improvement, and bit error rate (BER) at the receiver end. Such end-to-end performance evaluation is important because the 16-QAM CO-OFDM signal status is heterogeneous and the mitigation of transmission impairments to the signal is still unclear. The OPC parametric optimization is achieved experimentally using commercially available HNLFs with different scenarios and the numerical results are interpreted in conjunction with simulations.