Experimental Study of MLSE Receivers in the Presence of Narrow-Band and Vestigial Sideband Optical Filtering

We report on experimental investigations of real-time maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) in the presence of narrow-band optical filtering, using 10.7-Gb/s non return-to-zero on-off keying (NRZ-OOK) and a fiber grating filter with 6.25 GHz bandwidth. Compared to standard threshold detection, the MLSE eliminates a 10-3 error floor due to narrowband optical filtering and results in a