Complementary Polarization-Diversity Coherent Receiver for Self-Coherent Homodyne Detection With Rapid Polarization Tracking

Abstract

There has been renewed interest in coherent detection to provide high spectral efficiency transmission for short-reach optical interconnects. However, the expensive high-stable laser sources may preclude its potential application. To balance the high performance and low cost for short-reach optical networks, the self-coherent homodyne receiver has been investigated, where the dual-polarization (DP) signal and the remote local oscillator (LO) originating from the same laser source co-propagate over a duplex fiber, enabling a remarkable tolerance of laser linewidth. However, the fast evolution of the state of polarization (SOP) of remotely delivered LO becomes problematic for self-coherent hom..