The exponential traffic growth driven by high bandwidth applications such as video on demand and video gaming, is continuously forcing network operators to implement new schemes to increase the capacity offered to the end user. In particular, passive optical networks with a full-duplex capacity with 10 Gbps over 40-km spans are expected to be developed shortly. However, the range of such systems is severely penalized. In order to increase the range, coherent optical (CO) communications have regained attention. In particular, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has been proposed due to its robustness to the chromatic dispersion, its high spectral efficiency, and its flexibility. However, the high peak to average ratio of OFDM signals makes them very vulnerable to fiber nonlinear distortions. In this paper we propose a novel low-complexity equalizer based on the inverse Hammerstein model to partially compensate the nonlinear distortion in CO-OFDM networks. Numerical simulations using the split-step Fourier transform, reveal the potential of the proposed nonlinear equalizer to increase the range up to 115 km.18th International Conference on Transparent Optical Networks (ICTON)JUL 10-14, 2016Univ Trento, Fac Letters & Philosophy, Trento, ITALY