• Digital Backpropagation
• Digital Signal Processing
• Low-Complexity
• Nonlinear impairments mitigation

To compensate for linear and nonlinear distortions, several optical and digital techniques have been proposed. However, the significant performance improvement due to the combination of coherent detection with Digital Signal Processing has resulted in an almost complete abandonment of optical techniques. Consequently, digital nonlinear compensation has prevailed; this technique includes digital back propagation, perturbation-based techniques, and a combination of these two. All of these digital methods rely on numerically solving the nonlinear Schrödinger equation.

Despite the well-known potential of digital back propagation, this method has an Achilles heel: its computational complexity. The aim of the current study is to analyze and investigate on the performance obtained using a low-complexity numerical method that can be used in DBP to solve the NLSE. Such a method is the Enhanced split-step Fourier method suggested by Secondini, Marsella and Forestieri.