Phase noise effects on high spectral efficiency coherent optical OFDM transmission

Abstract

There are three major advantages for coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) transmission using digital signal processing. First, coherent detection is realized by digital phase estimation without the need for optical phase-locked loop. Second, OFDM modulation and demodulation are realized by the well-established computation-efficient fast Fourier transform (FFT) and inverse FFT. Third, adaptive data rates can be supported as different quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations are software-defined, without any hardware change in transmitter and receiver. However, it is well-known that coherent detection, OFDM, and QAM are all susceptible to phase nois..