View article

There have been numerous attempts to determine the channel capacity of a nonlinear fiber-optic communication channel. The main approach was to consider amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise as a predominant effect and to observe the fiber nonlinearities as the perturbation of a linear case or as the multiplicative noise. In this paper, the achievable information rates for high-speed optical transmission (40 Gb/s and above) are calculated using the finite-state-machine approach. In calculations, the combined effect of ASE noise, Kerr nonlinearity [self-phase modulation (SPM), intrachannel four-wave mixing (IFWM), intrachannel cross-phase modulation (IXPM)], stimulated Raman scattering (SRS), chromatic dispersion, and (optical/electrical) filtering is taken into account.