Phase-coherent lightwave communications with frequency combs

Fiber-optical networks are a crucial telecommunication infrastructure in society. Wavelength division multiplexing allows for transmitting parallel data streams over the fiber bandwidth, and coherent detection enables the use of sophisticated modulation formats and electronic compensation of signal impairments. In the future, optical frequency combs may replace multiple lasers used for the different wavelength channels. We demonstrate two novel signal processing schemes that take advantage of the broadband phase coherence of optical frequency combs. This approach allows for a more efficient estimation and compensation of optical phase noise in coherent communication systems, which can significantly simplify the signal processing or increase the transmission performance. With further advances in space division multiplexing and chip-scale frequency comb sources, these findings pave the way for compact energy-efficient optical transceivers.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

Efficient Parallel Carrier Recovery for Ultrahigh Speed Coherent QAM Receivers with Application to Optical Channels

This work presents a new efficient parallel carrier recovery architecture suitable for ultrahigh speed intradyne coherent optical receivers (e.g., ≥100 Gb/s) with quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). The proposed scheme combines a novel low-latency parallel digital phase locked loop (DPLL) with a feedforward carrier phase recovery (CPR) algorithm. The new low-latency parallel DPLL is designed to compensate not only carrier frequency offset but also frequency fluctuations such as those induced by mechanical vibrations or power supply noise. Such carrier frequency fluctuations must be compensated since they lead to higher phase error variance in traditional feedforward CPR techniques, significantly degrading the receiver performance. In order to enable a parallel-processing implementation in multigigabit per second receivers, a new approximation to the DPLL computation is introduced. The proposed technique reduces the latency within the feedback loop of the DPLL introduced by parallel processing, while at the same time it provides a bandwidth and capture range close to those achieved by a serial DPLL. Simulation results demonstrate that the effects caused by frequency deviations can be eliminated with the proposed low latency parallel carrier recovery architecture.Fil: Gianni, Pablo. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Electrónica. Laboratorio de Comunicaciones Digitales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Ferster, Laura. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Electrónica. Laboratorio de Comunicaciones Digitales; ArgentinaFil: Corral Briones, Graciela. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Electrónica. Laboratorio de Comunicaciones Digitales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Hueda, Mario Rafael. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas Físicas y Naturales. Departamento de Electrónica. Laboratorio de Comunicaciones Digitales; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Joint estimation of dynamic polarization and carrier phase with pilot-based adaptive equalizer in PDM-64 QAM transmission system

A pilot-based adaptive equalizer is investigated for high cardinality polarizationdivision-multiplexing quadrature amplitude modulation transmission systems. Pilot symbols are periodically inserted for joint estimation of the dynamic state of polarization (SOP) and carrier phase, in a least mean square (LMS) sense. Compared to decision-directed least mean square (DDLMS) equalization and radially-directed equalization, the proposed equalizer can achieve robust equalization and phase estimation, especially in low optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) scenarios. In an experiment on 56 GBaud PDM-64 QAM transmission over 400 km standard single-mode fiber, we obtained at least 0.35 bit per symbol generalized mutual information (GMI) improvement compared with other training symbol-based equalization when tracking 600 krad/s dynamic SOP. With the joint estimation scheme, the equalization performance will not be compromised even if the SOP speed reaches 600 krad/s or the laser linewidth approaches 2 MHz. For the first time, it is demonstrated that the pilot-based equalizer can track dynamic SOP rotation and compensate for fiber linear impairments without any cycle slips under extreme conditions

Comparison of direct and heterodyne detection optical intersatellite communication links

The performance of direct and heterodyne detection optical intersatellite communication links are evaluated and compared. It is shown that the performance of optical links is very sensitive to the pointing and tracking errors at the transmitter and receiver. In the presence of random pointing and tracking errors, optimal antenna gains exist that will minimize the required transmitter power. In addition to limiting the antenna gains, random pointing and tracking errors also impose a power penalty in the link budget. This power penalty is between 1.6 to 3 dB for a direct detection QPPM link, and 3 to 5 dB for a heterodyne QFSK system. For the heterodyne systems, the carrier phase noise presents another major factor of performance degradation that must be considered. In contrast, the loss due to synchronization error is small. The link budgets for direct and heterodyne detection systems are evaluated. It is shown that, for systems with large pointing and tracking errors, the link budget is dominated by the spatial tracking error, and the direct detection system shows a superior performance because it is less sensitive to the spatial tracking error. On the other hand, for systems with small pointing and tracking jitters, the antenna gains are in general limited by the launch cost, and suboptimal antenna gains are often used in practice. In which case, the heterodyne system has a slightly higher power margin because of higher receiver sensitivity

DSP algorithms for recovering single-carrier Alamouti coded signals for PON applications

Alamouti space-time block code (STBC) combined with a simple heterodyne coherent receiver enables phase diverse coherent detection without any optical polarization tracking. While such a system consisting of only a 3-dB coupler and a single balanced photodiode has been recently demonstrated using orthogonal frequency-division multiplexed (OFDM) signals, herein we report the first application to single-carrier systems. Applicability of such technique for single-carrier systems is not straightforward since specialized digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms are required for data recovery. In this paper, we address the implementing issues and DSP algorithms applicable for single-carrier (SC) Alamouti STBC based simplified heterodyne receivers. Polarization-insensitive operation of the proposed scheme and its performance are verified by means of simulation for a 12-Gbits/s quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) transmission system.European Union (Project ICONE (Grant ID: 608099)), Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (UNLOC (Grant ID: EP/J017582/1)

Applications of Kalman Filters for Coherent Optical Communication Systems

In this chapter, we review various applications of Kalman filtering for coherent optical communication systems. First, we briefly discuss the principles of Kalman filter and its variations including extended Kalman filter (EKF) and adaptive Kalman filter (AKF). Later on, we illustrate the applicability of Kalman filters for joint tracking of several optical transmission impairments, simultaneously, by formulating the state space model (SSM) and detailing the principles. A detailed methodology is presented for the joint tracking of linear and nonlinear phase noise along with amplitude noise using EKF. Also, approaches to enhance the performance obtained by EKF by combining with other existing digital signal processing (DSP) techniques are presented. Frequency and phase offset estimation using a two stage linear Kalman filter (LKF)/EKF is also discussed. A cascaded structure of LKF and EKF by splitting the SSM to jointly mitigate the effects of polarization, phase and amplitude noise is also presented. The numerical analysis concludes that the Kalman filter based approaches outperform the conventional methods with better tracking capability and faster convergence besides offering more feasibility for real-time implementations

Polarization Drift Channel Model for Coherent Fibre-Optic Systems

A theoretical framework is introduced to model the dynamical changes of the state of polarization during transmission in coherent fibre-optic systems. The model generalizes the one-dimensional phase noise random walk to higher dimensions, accounting for random polarization drifts, emulating a random walk on the Poincar\'e sphere, which has been successfully verified using experimental data. The model is described in the Jones, Stokes and real four-dimensional formalisms, and the mapping between them is derived. Such a model will be increasingly important in simulating and optimizing future systems, where polarization-multiplexed transmission and sophisticated digital signal processing will be natural parts. The proposed polarization drift model is the first of its kind as prior work either models polarization drift as a deterministic process or focuses on polarization-mode dispersion in systems where the state of polarization does not affect the receiver performance. We expect the model to be useful in a wide-range of photonics applications where stochastic polarization fluctuation is an issue.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figure

Overhead-optimization of pilot-based digital signal processing for flexible high spectral efficiency transmission

We present a low-complexity fully pilot-based digital signal processing (DSP) chain designed for high spectral efficiency optical transmission systems. We study the performance of the individual pilot algorithms in simulations before demonstrating transmission of a 51 724 Gbaud PM-64QAM superchannel over distances reaching 1000 km. We present an overhead optimization technique using the system achievable information rate to find the optimal balance between increased performance and throughput reduction from adding additional DSP pilots. Using the optimal overhead of 2.4%, we report 9.3 (8.3) bits/s/Hz spectral efficiency, or equivalently 11.9 (10.6) Tb/s superchannel throughput, after 480 (960) km of transmission over 80 km spans with EDFA-only amplification. Moreover, we show that the optimum overhead depends only weakly on transmission distance, concluding that back-to-back optimization is sufficient for all studied distances. Our results show that pilot-based DSP combined with overhead optimization can increase the robustness and performance of systems using advanced modulation formats while still maintaining state-of-the-art spectral efficiency and multi-Tb/s throughput