Optical Nonlinearity Mitigation Using Reservoir Computing with Tapped-Delay Lines

We investigated a nonlinear equalizer based on reservoir computing (RC) with tapped-delay lines for compensating for linear and nonlinear waveform distortion caused by, e.g., chromatic dispersion and self-phase modulation. We evaluated and compared the equalization performance of RC systems with and without tapped-delay lines by numerical simulation, while varying the parameters and the transmission distance. The proposed equalizer construction enables the use of RC with a shorter time-constant than that used for conventional RC-based nonlinear equalizers.