Hardware-Efficient and Performance-Enhanced Joint Pulse Shaping and Dispersion Compensation for Coherent Data Center Interconnects
2026-05-25 • Information Theory
Information TheoryNetworking and Internet Architecture
AI summaryⓘ
The authors address the challenge of increased computing needs in advanced optical communications caused by 5G/6G data traffic and AI. They introduce a new method called JFS-CD, which shifts some signal processing to the transmitter to simplify the overall process. To handle issues with signal power peaks, they add a simple filtering step called SBC. Their experiments show this combined approach uses less computing power and slightly improves signal quality compared to older methods. This work could help make future data centers faster and more energy-efficient.
coherent optical communicationchromatic dispersiondigital signal processingbaud ratemodulation formatsdiscrete Fourier transformpeak-to-average power ratioclipping algorithmdata center interconnectsQ-factor
Authors
Yukun Zhang, Xiaoxue Gong, Weigang Hou, Xu Zhang, Lei Guo
Abstract
With the explosion of data traffic triggered by 5G/6G and Generative artificial intelligence, coherent optical communication is moving towards higher baud rates and more complex modulation formats. This leads to a significant increase in the computational complexity and power consumption of digital signal processing (DSP) at the transmitter and receiver ends, especially in the chromatic dispersion(CD) Compensation and low roll-off shaping filter modules. We propose a joint shaping filtering and CD compensation (JFS-CD) algorithm. This algorithm moves the CD compensation to the transmitter side and utilizes the characteristics of discrete fourier transform and the spectral features of shaping filtering for integrated processing. Aiming at the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) problem caused by chromatic dispersion pre-compensation, we propose a low-complexity square boundary clipping algorithm(SBC). Simulation results show that, under the premise of maintaining unchanged performance, JFS-CD can reduce the real multiplication complexity by about 46%. Meanwhile, benefiting from the suppression of the effects of system nonlinearity and receiver IQ imbalance, the joint JFS-CD and SBC scheme improves the Q-factor by about 0.3 dB in experiments compared to the traditional post-chromatic dispersion compensation scheme. This research provides a highly potential transmitter DSP solution for next-generation low-power and high-performance data center interconnects (DCI).