A Fast Method for optimizing the Amplifier Output Back-off by Means of the Total Degradation

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel technique to derive the optimal amplifier working point, in terms of output back-off, for a transmission system adopting a nonlinear amplifier. The proposed strategy is based on an alternative way to compute the total degradation, based on an information theoretical analysis, which allows to find the optimal back-off in a significantly faster and less computationally demanding way with respect to the classical method. Despite this, we show, by means of an example, that we can obtain the same results and, hence, our strategy can be applied without incurring in performance penalties.