The present invention is directed to a communication signal tracking system comprising an optical receiver including one or more delay line interferometers (DLIs) configured to demultiplex incoming optical signals and a transimpedance amplifier configured to convert the incoming optical signals to incoming electrical signals. The communication signal tracking system further includes a control module configured to calculate a bit-error-rate (BER) of the incoming electrical signals before forward-error correction decoding, and use the BER as a parameter for optimizing settings of the one or more DLIs in one or more iterations in a control loop and generating a back-channel data.