Advanced digital signal processing for coherent optical OFDM transmissions

Coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) has been actively considered as a potential candidate for long-haul transmission and 400 Gb/s to 1 Tb/s Ethernet transport because of its high spectral efficiency, efficient implementation, flexibility and robustness against linear impairments such as chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion. However, due to the long symbol duration and narrow subcarrier spacing, CO-OFDM systems are sensitive to laser phase noise and fibre nonlinearity induced penalties. As a result, the development of CO-OFDM transmission technology crucially relies on efficient techniques to compensate for the laser phase noise and fibre nonlinearity impairments. In this thesis, high performance and low complexity digital signal processing techniques for laser phase noise and fibre nonlinearity compensation in CO-OFDM transmissions are demonstrated. For laser phase noise compensation, three novel techniques, namely quasipilot-aided, decision-directed-free blind and multiplier-free blind are introduced. For fibre nonlinear compensation, two novel techniques which are referred to as phase conjugated pilots and phase conjugated subcarrier coding, are proposed. All these abovementioned digital signal processing techniques offer high performances and flexibilities while requiring relatively low complexities in comparison with other existing phase noise and nonlinear compensation techniques. As a result of the developments of these digital signal processing techniques, CO-OFDM technology is expected to play a significant role in future ultra-high capacity optical network. In addition, this thesis also presents preliminary study on nonlinear Fourier transform based transmission schemes in which OFDM is a highly suitable modulation format. The obtained result paves the way towards a truly flexible nonlinear wave-division multiplexing system that allows the current nonlinear transmission limitations to be exceeded

Phase And Amplitude Modulated Ofdm For Dispersion Managed Wdm Systems

Amplitude and phase modulated optical OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing) are analyzed in a 50GBit/s single channel and 40GBit/s 5 channel 512 subcarrier non-ideal dispersion-compensated fiber optic communication systems. PM-OFDM is investigated as an alternative to AM-OFDM to alleviate the problem associated with amplitude-modulated signals in a nonlinear medium. The inherent dispersion compensation capability in OFDM (using a cyclic prefix) allows transmission over a link whose dispersion map is not exactly known. OFDM also mitigates the effects of dispersion slope in wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) systems. Moreover, the overall dispersion throughout the transmission link may vary due to environmental effects and aging. OFDM is inherently tolerant to over- or under-compensation and dispersion slope mismatch. OFDM transmission over dispersive, non-dispersion managed fiber links using OFDM requires an overhead in excess of the maximum accumulated dispersion. Existing WDM systems usually employ periodic dispersion management. OFDM in these systems requires a smaller overhead. It is, however, more susceptible to nonlinearity due to the coherent beating of subcarriers after each dispersion-compensated span. The large variation in intensity associated with amplitude-modulated OFDM makes this modulation format more susceptible to nonlinear effects in fiber compared to phase-modulated signals. This holds true unless dispersion and EDFA noise lead to amplitude variations strong enough for PM-OFDM to be degraded by nonlinear effects as well. In conclusion OFDM is beneficial for non-ideal dispersion managed systems. PM-OFDM can further improve the performance

Performance and Compensation of I/Q Imbalance in Differential STBC-OFDM

Differential space time block coding (STBC) achieves full spatial diversity and avoids channel estimation overhead. Over highly frequency-selective channels, STBC is integrated with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) to achieve high performance. However, low-cost implementation of differential STBC-OFDM using direct-conversion transceivers is sensitive to In-phase/Quadrature-phase imbalance (IQI). In this paper, we quantify the performance impact of IQI at the receiver front-end on differential STBC-OFDM systems and propose a compensation algorithm to mitigate its effect. The proposed receiver IQI compensation works in an adaptive decision-directed manner without using known pilots or training sequences, which reduces the rate loss due to training overhead. Our numerical results show that our proposed compensation algorithm can effectively mitigate receive IQI in differential STBC-OFDM.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, IEEE GLOBECOM 201