Reservoir Computing-Based Equalization for WDM-DP-16QAM Coherent Optical Communication

In long-haul optical communication systems, the complex interplay between Kerr nonlinearity, chromatic dispersion (CD), and amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise from in-line amplifiers makes digital signal processing (DSP)-based nonlinearity compensation computationally intensive and challenging. We propose an enhanced reservoir computing (RC) equalization architecture for a 7-channel WDM 16QAM coherent optical communication system. The performance of our proposed model is evaluated and compared with digital backpropagation (DBP) linear algorithms, original RC, and third-order Volterra architectures. The results demonstrate superior performance improvements than other equalizers.