Digital Signal Processing and Optical Networking

Dear Colleagues,

The rapid development of information globalization, democratization, and digital transformation, as well as associated new services and applications, raises new challenges for communication systems in general and especially for optical communication systems as the enabler of the ever-increasing demand for higher capacity.

Single-mode fibers can reach the theoretical limits of Shannon information capacity. To avoid a lack of capacity, achieve high reliability, high energy efficiency, low latency and low-cost, the reinvention of traditional optical communication is required.

From the beginning of this century, digitally coherent optical communication has developed into an important research direction.  Coherent detection, with a large-bandwidth analogue-to-digital converter, digital-to-analogue converter and digital signal processing (DSP) has increased the achievable capacity of optical fiber communication systems.

These systems rely on complex digital signal processing (DSP) and forward error correction (FEC) contributing to a significant amount of the overall link power dissipation. Bandwidth demands are continuously growing. Circuit scaling technology is approaching its end due to fundamental limitations. Therefore, the energy-efficient design of DSP is necessary both from a sustainability and a technical perspective.

Integrated photonic systems utilizing advanced digital signal processing (DSP) and all-optical signal processing methods are favorable candidates to meet the requirements of next-generation optical communication systems.

In recent years, new applications such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Augmented/Virtual Reality, Cloud Computing, storage and other software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) models have driven demands for short-reach links in data centers.

Short-reach communications jointly refer to optical communication links of hundreds of meters connecting one server to another within a DC and to inter-DC links of tens of kilometers. On the other extreme, on-board chip-to-chip optical communication interconnects at an even shorter distance.

DSP is playing a significant role in analogue fronthaul transport architectures such as 5G and beyond, achieving high spectral efficiencies, multiplexing/demultiplexing large numbers of channels, increasing flexibility, and reducing latency.

This Special Issue aims to present a new trend in DSP applications for various advanced optical communication systems and networks. Example topics of interest are the application of DSP in areas such as:

• Advanced modulation formats: DSP, all-optical signal processing;
• Space division multiplexing: multimode and multicore fibers;
• Fixed and mobile network convergence;
• Mitigation of optical channel distortion due to chromatic dispersion, PMD, PDL, fiber nonlinearities, interference;
• Multiple access techniques;
• DSP for visible light communication applications;
• Mobile fronthaul and backhaul links;
• Software-defined networking:dynamic bandwidth allocation;
• Computational complexity and reduction in the power consumption;
• Experimental demonstration of real-time DSP systems;
• Machine learning for network management, system calibration and performance improvement.

Prof. Dr. Yosef Ben Ezra
Guest Editor

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• signal processing;
• optical network;
• network management;
• machine learning.