Nonlinearity mitigation for high-speed optical OFDM transmitters using digital pre-distortion

Optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OOFDM) signal is sensitive to nonlinear distortions induced by optical modulators. We propose and experimentally demonstrate a digital pre-distortion (DPD) algorithm to linearize the optical modulators including electro-absorption modulated lasers (EML) and Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZM) used in high-speed OOFDM transmitters. By using an adaptive DPD algorithm with a learning structure, the inverse transfer function of a modulator, which is based on a polynomial model, has been obtained. In the experiment, the performance improvements with and without considering the memory effects of the DPD model are illustrated. The two typical kinds of high-speed OOFDM signals with a bit rate up to 30-Gb/s have been implemented experimentally. The results show that the nonlinear distortion induced by optical modulators can be compensated by using the DPD algorithm to substantially improve the optical modulation index.