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V. Bajaj

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10 records found

Doctoral thesis (2025) - V. Bajaj, M.H.G. Verhaegen, S. Wahls, R. Van de Plas
The global internet protocol (IP) traffic is rising exponentially due to the increased number of bandwidth-intensive services like video-on-demand and cloud computing. To meet the demands of growing traffic, the data rates of fiber optic communication systems (FOCSs) need to be increased. In this regard, digital signal processing (DSP), which already plays a powerful role in the modern FOCSs, is being explored. Increasing the net data rate of FOCSs requires compensation for nonlinear impairments that can arise from the Kerr effect during the propagation of signal through fiber as well as from the non-ideal responses of transceiver hardware components. Furthermore, cutbacks in net data rates due to training overheads, i.e., the non-information carrying part of transmitted data consumed by DSP algorithms; need to be reduced. In this dissertation, we propose novel DSP approaches to address these problems of great practical interest.

The Kerr nonlinear effects add phase shifts to the signal, which are dependent on its instantaneous power. These phase distortions occur simultaneously with the dispersion effect of the fiber, which spreads signal pulses in time. The interplay is complicated and makes compensation of distortions challenging. The nonlinear Fourier transform(NFT), which offers immunity from the distortions of the Kerr effect, received great interest in recent years. The lossless nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE), which models signal propagation in an ideal lossless optical fiber, belongs to a class of nonlinear partial differential equations known as integrable equations. These integrable equations can be solved exactly by NFT. Similar to the Fourier transform that translates a linear dispersive propagation in the time domain into phase delays in the signal spectrum, the NFT translates the nonlinear evolution of the signal governed by the lossless NLSE into trivial multiplications in the nonlinear Fourier spectrum of the signal. The NFT is exact for lossless fiber channels. In the presence of loss, the integrability property is violated. In lossy propagation, signal power reduces as it propagates. This in turn reduces the strength of the nonlinear effects along the length of the fiber. As practical fibers are lossy, the path-average approximation is often used to apply NFT on lossy fiber channels. In this approximation, the variation in the Kerr nonlinear effects due to the reduction in signal power is accounted as the variations in the Kerr-nonlinearity parameter of the fiber. Then, by approximating the varying Kerr-nonlinearity parameter with its average value over a span, a lossless fiber model is obtained. This approximation has errors associated with it which sacrifices the performance. We developed a NFT-based transmission system that is exact even in the presence of fiber loss. The proposed design eliminates errors due to loss, thus improving performance over the design that uses path-average approximation… ...
Journal article (2024) - Vinod Bajaj, Raf Van de Plas, Sander Wahls
While probabilistic constellation shaping (PCS) enables rate and reach adaption with finer granularity [1] (Cho and Winzer, 2009), it imposes signal processing challenges at the receiver. Since the distribution of PCS-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals tends to be Gaussian, conventional blind polarization demultiplexing algorithms are not suitable for them [2] (Johnson et al., 1998). It is known that independently and identically distributed (iid) Gaussian signals, when mixed, cannot be recovered/separated from their mixture. For PCS-QAM signals, there are algorithms such as [3] and [4] Dris et al. (2019) and Athuraliya et al. (2004) which are designed by extending conventional blind algorithms used for uniform QAM signals. In these algorithms, an initialization point is obtained by processing only a part of the mixed signal, which have non-Gaussian statistics. In this article, we propose an alternative method wherein we add temporal correlations at the transmitter, which are subsequently exploited at the receiver in order to separate the polarizations. We will refer to the proposed method as frequency domain (FD) joint diagonalization (JD) probability aware-multi modulus algorithm (pr-MMA), and it is suited to channels with moderate polarization mode dispersion (PMD) effects. Furthermore, we extend our previously proposed JD-MMA [5] (Bajaj et al., 2022) by replacing the standard MMA with a pr-MMA, improving its performance. Both FDJD-pr-MMA and JD-pr-MMA are evaluated for a diverse range of PCS (entropy $\mathcal {H}$) of 64-QAM over a first-order PMD channel that is simulated in a proof-of-concept setup. A MMA initialized with a memoryless constant modulus algorithm (CMA) is used as a benchmark. We show that at a differential group delay (DGD) of 10% of symbol period T$_{\text{symb}}$ and 18 dB SNR/pol., JD-pr-MMA successfully demultiplexes the PCS signals, while CMA-MMA fails drastically. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the newly proposed FDJD-pr-MMA is robust against moderate PMD effects by evaluating it over a DGD of up to 40% of T$_{\text{symb}}$. Our results show that the proposed FDJD-pr-MMA successfully equalizes PMD channels with a DGD up to 20% of T$_{\text{symb}}$. ...
Conference paper (2022) - V. Bajaj, Mathieu Chagnon, S. Wahls, Vahid Aref
We present a simple, efficient “direct learning” approach to train Volterra series-based pre-distortion filters using neural networks. We show its superior performance over conventional training methods using a 64-QAM 64 GBaud simulated transmitter with varying transmitter nonlinearity and noisy conditions. ...
Conference paper (2022) - Vinod Bajaj, Raf Van De Plas, Vahid Aref, Sander Wahls
We propose a novel method for blind polarization-demultiplexing of probabilistically shaped signals for coherent receivers. The method is capable of separating signals with (quasi) Gaussian distributions by exploiting temporal correlations added to the transmit signals. The proposed method is evaluated in challenging mixing scenarios. ...
Journal article (2022) - Vinod Bajaj, Fred Buchali, Mathieu Chagnon, Sander Wahls, Vahid Aref
High-symbol-rate coherent optical transceivers suffer more from the critical responses of transceiver components at high frequency, especially when applying a higher order modulation format. Recently, we proposed in [20] a neural network (NN)-based digital pre-distortion (DPD) technique trained to mitigate the transceiver response of a 128~GBaud optical coherent transmission system. In this paper, we further detail this work and assess the NN-based DPD by training it using either a direct learning architecture (DLA) or an indirect learning architecture (ILA), and compare performance against a Volterra series-based DPD and a linear DPD. Furthermore, we willfully increase the transmitter nonlinearity and compare the performance of the three DPDs considered. The proposed NN-based DPD trained using DLA performs the best among the three contenders, providing more than 1~dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gains for uniform 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) and PCS-256-QAM signals at the output of a conventional coherent receiver DSP. Finally, the NN-based DPD enables achieving a record 1.61~Tb/s net rate transmission on a single channel after 80~km of standard single mode fiber (SSMF). ...
Conference paper (2021) - Vinod Bajaj, Fred Buchali, Mathieu Chagnon, Sander Wahls, Vahid Aref
We demonstrate a record 54.5 Tb/s WDM transmission at 11.35 bit/s/Hz over 48 km of field-deployed SMF connecting business and academic parks enabled by a novel joint I-Q Neural Network-based transmitter digital pre-distortion technique. ...
Conference paper (2021) - Vladislav Neskorniuk, Fred Buchali, Vinod Bajaj, Sergei K. Turitsyn, Jaroslaw E. Prilepsky, Vahid Aref
We propose an efficient neural-network-based equalization jointly compensating fiber and transceiver nonlinearities for high-symbol-rate coherent short-reach links. Providing about 0.9 dB extra SNR gain, it allows achieving experimentally the record single-channel 1.48 Tbps net rate over 240 km G.652 fiber. ...
Journal article (2020) - Vinod Bajaj, Shrinivas Chimmalgi, Vahid Aref, Sander Wahls
Nonlinear frequency division multiplexing (NFDM) techniques encode information in the so-called nonlinear spectrum which is obtained from the nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT) of a signal. NFDM techniques so far have been applied to the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLSE) that models signal propagation in a lossless fiber. Conventionally, the true lossy NLSE is approximated by a lossless NLSE using the path-average approach which makes the propagation model suitable for NFDM. The error of the path-average approximation depends strongly on signal power, bandwidth and the span length. It can degrade the performance of NFDM systems and imposes challenges on designing high data rate NFDM systems. Previously, we proposed the idea of using dispersion decreasing fiber (DDF) for NFDM systems. These DDFs can be modeled by a NLSE with varying-parameters that can be solved with a specialized NFT without approximation errors. We have shown in simulations that complete nonlinearity mitigation can be achieved in lossy fibers by designing an NFDM system with DDF if a properly adapted NFT is used. We reported performance gains by avoiding the aforementioned path-average error in an NFDM system by modulating the discrete part of the nonlinear spectrum. In this paper, we extend the proposed idea to the modulation of continuous spectrum. We compare the performance of NFDM systems designed with dispersion decreasing fiber to that of systems designed with a standard fiber with the path-average model. Next to the conventional path-average model, we furthermore compare the proposed system with an optimized path-average model in which amplifier locations can be adapted. We quantify the improvement in the performance of NFDM systems that use DDF through numerical simulations. ...
Conference paper (2020) - V. Bajaj, Fred Buchali, Mathieu Chagnon, S. Wahls, Vahid Aref
We propose a novel digital pre-distortion (DPD) based on neural networks for high-baudrate optical coherent transmitters. We demonstrate experimentally that it outperforms an optimized linear DPD giving a 1.2 dB SNR gain in a 128GBaud PCS-256QAM single-channel transmission over 80km of standard single-mode fiber resulting in a record 1.61 Tb/s net data rate. ...
Conference paper (2019) - Vinod Bajaj, Shrinivas Chimmalgi, Vahid Aref, Sander Wahls
The path-average approximation penalizes NFDM transmission over lumped amplified fiber links.We investigate suitably tapered lossy fibers to overcome the approximation error induced by the path average, making the NFDM transmission exact. Error vector magnitude gains up to 4.8 dB are observed. ...