  In fiber-optic communications, evaluation of mutual information (MI) is still
an open issue due to the unavailability of an exact and mathematically
tractable channel model. Traditionally, lower bounds on MI are computed by
approximating the (original) channel with an auxiliary forward channel. In this
paper, lower bounds are computed using an auxiliary backward channel, which has
not been previously considered in the context of fiber-optic communications.
Distributions obtained through two variations of the stochastic digital
backpropagation (SDBP) algorithm are used as auxiliary backward channels and
these bounds are compared with bounds obtained through the conventional digital
backpropagation (DBP). Through simulations, higher information rates were
achieved with SDBP, {which can be explained by the ability of SDBP to account
for nonlinear signal--noise interactions
