Experimental demonstration of split nonlinearity compensation in long-haul transmission systems

We experimentally investigate the nonlinearity compensation performance of split nonlinearity compensation (NLC) schemes for single- and three-channel systems at baud rates of 16, 32, 64 and 128 GBd. Our results show that at 1000 km, receiver-side NLC achieves the best performance as transmitter-side schemes are limited by high peak-to-average power ratio when implementing dispersion pre-compensation. At 7796 km, split NLC reduces the penalty imposed by signal-noise interactions, increasing SNR by up to 1.39 dB at 64 GBd versus transmitter/receiver-side NLC only. This work illustrates the potential of split NLC algorithms for mitigating nonlinear throughput limitations in single-mode fibre.