Impact of InterChannel Interference in gridless nyquist-wdm systems with and without nonlinear impairments compensation

This paper presents a characterization of interchannel interference (ICI) effects in gridless Nyquist-wdm systems due to two contributions, namely, overlapping among optical carriers and stimulation of nonlinear optical fiber impairments. ICI is assessed regarding bit error rate (BER) at 16 and 32 Gbaud, as a function of several system parameters. Nonlinear impairment compensation based on the digital back-propagation algorithm is implemented in the DSP-based coherent receiver. Results demonstrated that ICI due to channels overlapped has a higher impact concerning BER than nonlinear optical fiber impairments. Besides, the use of the back-propagation algorithm improves system performance, reducing up to 3 and 0.7 orders of magnitude of BER in QPSK and 16QAM cases, respectively. It means that this algorithm can minimize nonlinear effects under varying system parameters, but its performance is limited in sub-Nyquist cases.