On nonlinearly-induced noise in single-channel optical links with digital backpropagation.

In this paper, we investigate the performance limits of electronic chromatic dispersion compensation (EDC) and digital backpropagation (DBP) for a single-channel non-dispersion-managed fiber-optical link. A known analytical method to derive the performance of the system with EDC is extended to derive a first-order approximation for the performance of the system with DBP. In contrast to the cubic growth of the variance of the nonlinear noise-like interference, often called nonlinear noise, with input power for EDC, a quadratic growth is observed with DBP using this approximation.