Application of functional link artificial neural network for mitigating nonlinear effects in coherent optical OFDM

Artificial Neural Networks are developed as an important technique for equalization and have been widely used to mitigate the nonlinear effects in coherent optical systems. For the compensation of nonlinearities in coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing technique, the most popular artificial neural network model is a multilayer perceptron (MLP), as it is able to perform complex mapping between input and output spaces with significant success. However due to the complexity of multilayer perceptron nonlinear equalizer (MLP-NLE) model training of neural network is difficult. To overcome computational complexity issues of MLP-NLE, a single neuron based functional link artificial neural network nonlinear equalizer (FLANN-NLE) has been developed in this paper. Better performance of an equalizer is attributed to the usage of aPSO-BP algorithm for training the FLANN-NLE. The proposed FLANN-NLE surpasses the existing works both in terms of Q-Factor and computational complexity. For a fiber length of 1000 km and at launch power of ?6 dBm, the improvement in Q-Factor is approximately equal to 3.3 and 1 dB in contrast to the previously reported values of approximately 3 and 0.7 dB at bit rate of 40 and 80 Gbps respectively.