Experimental implementation of a neural network optical channel equalizer in restricted hardware using pruning and quantization

Diego Argüello Ron, Pedro J Freire, Jaroslaw E Prilepsky, Morteza Kamalian-Kopae, Antonio Napoli, Sergei K Turitsyn

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The deployment of artificial neural networks-based optical channel equalizers on edge-computing devices is critically important for the next generation of optical communication systems. However, this is still a highly challenging problem, mainly due to the computational complexity of the artificial neural networks (NNs) required for the efficient equalization of nonlinear optical channels with large dispersion-induced memory. To implement the NN-based optical channel equalizer in hardware, a substantial complexity reduction is needed, while we have to keep an acceptable performance level of the simplified NN model. In this work, we address the complexity reduction problem by applying pruning and quantization techniques to an NN-based optical channel equalizer. We use an exemplary NN architecture, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP), to mitigate the impairments for 30 GBd 1000 km transmission over a standard single-mode fiber, and demonstrate that it is feasible to reduce the equalizer's memory by up to 87.12%, and its complexity by up to 78.34%, without noticeable performance degradation. In addition to this, we accurately define the computational complexity of a compressed NN-based equalizer in the digital signal processing (DSP) sense. Further, we examine the impact of using hardware with different CPU and GPU features on the power consumption and latency for the compressed equalizer. We also verify the developed technique experimentally, by implementing the reduced NN equalizer on two standard edge-computing hardware units: Raspberry Pi 4 and Nvidia Jetson Nano, which are used to process the data generated via simulating the signal's propagation down the optical-fiber system.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8713
JournalScientific Reports
Volume12
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 24 May 2022

Bibliographical note

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Funding: SKT and MKK are partially supported by the EPSRC programme Grant TRANSNET, EP/R035342/1. PJF and DAR acknowledge the support from the EU Horizon 2020 Marie Skodowska-Curie Action projects No. 813144 (REAL-NET) and 860360 (POST-DIGITAL), respectively. JEP and SKT acknowledge the support of the Leverhulme Trust project RPG-2018-063.

Keywords

  • Neural Networks, Computer
  • Optical Fibers
  • Computers
  • Optical Devices
  • Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted

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