detector based on the Bayesian framework of factor graphs [11]. However, because of the
stochastic nature and nonlinear properties of the NLPN, above approaches to suppress NLPN are
all depends on the parameters of the transmission link. When the signal propagates through
dynamic optical network link instead of the fixed point-to-point link, the variation of link parameters
would lead these existing methods to become invalid [12], [13]. Hence, it is meaningful to
investigate techniques which are independent of the parameters of the link to mitigate the NLPN.
Machine learning algorithms are efficient non-parameter methods for their properties of getting
the characteristic of systems from data directly. The support vector machine (SVM) as one of
powerful and widely used machine learning algorithms [14], requires a small number of parameters
during establishing its model. Moreover, the priori information and heuristic assumptions are
unnecessary for the SVM. In this paper, we introduce the M-ary SVM [15] as a non-parameter
method to mitigate the NLPN in the signal-carrier 16-QAM coherent optical systems. By
transforming the NLPN mitigation problem for the QAM signal into a hypothesis test problem, the
decision for the received signal is conducted by the M-ary SVM through a series of binary
classification in this work. Moreover, because the model of each SVM of the M-ary SVM is obtained
by a certain amount of training data, this scheme need not any information about the transmission
link. By numerical simulation, the results show that the M-ary SVM scheme can achieve better
performance than the method proposed by Lau and Kahn [9].
The structure of this paper is as follows. In Section 2, we detail the mathematical model of SVM
as a binary classifier, the M-ary SVM for NLPN mitigation scheme is also illustrated. The simulation
scheme conducted in our study is described in the Section 3. The simulation results and
discussions are presented in the Section 4. Section 5 concludes this paper.
2. Theory of M-ary SVM
Nonlinear phase noise mitigation for multilevel modulation signal by using the M-ary SVM is
achieved via a number of parallel SVMs followed by a set of logical processing. Each SVM
classifies every received symbol into one of the two groups by a specific decision boundary, which
is obtained through a certain amount of training data. Accordingly, there is no need to know any
characteristic of the transmission channel. In the following of this part, we will firstly introduce the
principle of SVM, as it is the core component of the M-ary SVM. At last, a systematic description
about the M-ary SVM for 16-QAM detection is given.
2.1. SVM as Classifier
Based on statistical learning theory, SVM is developed from linear classifier which aims at finding
the optimal separating hyperplane that maximizes the margin (i.e., maximizes the smallest distance
between the hyperplane and any of the samples) [16]. Meanwhile, the kernel method is also
adopted by the SVM to solve the nonlinear separable situation [17]. For the two-class linearly
separable problem in an n-dimensional feature space, the optimal separating hyperplane f ðv Þ is
derived through training L vectors v
1
; v
2
; ...; v
L
where v
k
2 R
n
and each vector corresponds to a
category label y
k
2f1; þ1g. The form of f ðv Þ is given by
f ðv Þ¼!
T
v þ b ¼ 0 (1)
where, the vector ! ¼ð!
1
;!
2
; ...!
n
Þ
T
and the scalar b are the parameters of the hyperplane.
Assuming that all the training data are separated by (1) correctly, we have y
k
ð!
T
v
k
þ bÞ 9 0
(this is because if y
k
¼þ1, f ðv
k
Þ 9 0; and if y
k
¼1, f ðv
k
Þ G 0) for every training instance-label
pair ðv
k
; y
k
Þ. So the Euclidean distance between vector v
k
and the hyperplane is
k
¼
j!
T
v
k
þ bj
k!k
¼
y
k
f ðv
k
Þ
k!k
: (2)
IEEE Photonics Journal NLPN Mitigation Using M-ary SVM Systems
Vol. 5, No. 6, December 2013 7800312