The OptCom group has carried out a thorough investigation of the so-called “symbol rate optimization” (SRO) strategy, which improves system performance by mitigating the impact of fiber non-linearity. The investigation was pushed to C-Band and showed that even in fully-loaded WDM systems SRO is quite effective. In fact, its effectiveness tends to grow with WDM bandwidth.

A very accurate comparison of SRO was carried out vs. backward propagation (BP), the currently most investigated algorithm for non-linearity mitigation. It turns out that for PM-QPSK system, for fully loaded C-band systems, SRO is typically much more effective than BP. For PM-16QAM, the two techniques tend to be equivalent, although SRO does not require the very heavy DSP burden of BP. The research was presented at the European Conference on Optical Communications (ECOC) in Valencia. 

The presentation is available here for download.