Capacity crunch has become critical in recent years as commercial communication systems approach their theoretical data rate limits. This work presents a low-complexity digital backpropagation (DBP) implementation approach based on step size distribution that uses a binary logarithmic step size method to achieve high data rate optical transmission. The proposed scheme shows performance improvements (∆Q) of 2.36 dB, 1.19 dB, and 0.71 dB over linear compensation, constant step size DBP, and logarithmic step size DBP techniques in a 2400 km 112 Gbit/s DP-16QAM system, respectively. At 13 dBm, a high performance (Q) of 10.9 dB (BER = 2.25×10-4) is achieved, above the 3.80×10-3 hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) limit, using the proposed scheme. Also, the allowable transmission distance is extended by 960 km at the HD-FEC limit over the linear compensation technique. The optimization achieves a 38% savings in the number of DBP calculation steps compared to the constant step size DBP, which considerably reduces the computational cost since a few steps are required for effective nonlinearity compensation.

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