Estimating the Volterra Series Transfer Function over coherent optical OFDM for efficient monitoring of the fiber channel nonlinearity.

We present an efficient method for system identification (nonlinear channel estimation) of third order nonlinear Volterra Series Transfer Function (VSTF) characterizing the four-wave-mixing nonlinear process over a coherent OFDM fiber link. Despite the seemingly large number of degrees of freedom in the VSTF (cubic in the number of frequency points) we identified a compressed VSTF representation which does not entail loss of information. Additional slightly lossy compression may be obtained by discarding very low power VSTF coefficients associated with regions of destructive interference in the FWM phased array effect. Based on this two-staged VSTF compressed representation, we develop a robust and efficient algorithm of nonlinear system identification (optical performance monitoring) estimating the VSTF by transmission of an extended training sequence over the OFDM link, performing just a matrix-vector multiplication at the receiver by a pseudo-inverse matrix which is pre-evaluated offline. For 512 (1024) frequency samples per channel, the VSTF measurement takes less than 1 (10) msec to complete with computational complexity of one real-valued multiply-add operation per time sample. Relative to a naïve exhaustive three-tone-test, our algorithm is far more tolerant of ASE additive noise and its acquisition time is orders of magnitude faster.