Comparison of Chromatic Dispersion Pre- and Post-Compensation with Kramers-Kronig Receiver

Chromatic dispersion (CD) is one of the main limitations for high speed intensity modulation and direct-detection transmission system. Electrical dispersion compensation is a cheaper and easier way to compensate CD. In this paper, we compare the performance of chromatic dispersion pre- and post-compensation for optical single side-band (SSB) 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) signal with Kramers-Kronig (KK) receiver by simulation and experiment. We put the pre-compensation after Hilbert transform at the transmitter side and the CD post-compensation after KK receiver at the receiver side. The results show that CD tolerance of the dual-drivel Mach-Zehnde modulator (DDMZM) based SSB signal is related to the optical modulation index (OMI) of the modulator in CD pre-and post-compensation scenarios. When the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) is relatively large, CD post-compensation is more sensitive to OMI than pre-compensation with KK receiver. We also explore the impact of signal peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) on the pre-compensation system by simulation.