Successive Interference Cancellation for Fiber-Optic Channels with Direct Detection

Two simplified transceiver architectures are studied for fiber-optic links with direct detection and oversampling: separate detection and decoding (SDD) and successive interference cancellation (SIC) with multi-level coding and multi-stage decoding. For bipolar modulation, SIC achieves rates close to those of joint detection and decoding (JDD), thereby achieving large energy gains over SDD and over classic intensity modulation. Gibbs sampling is used to reduce the detector complexity and achieves rates close to those of the forward-backward algorithm. Simulations with polar codes and higher-order modulation confirm the predicted rate and energy gains.