Low-Overhead Low-Complexity Carrier Phase Recovery Technique for Coherent Multi-Band OFDM-Based Superchannel Systems Enabled by Optical Frequency Combs

Abstract In this paper, we have designed a low-overhead low-complexity carrier phase tracking scheme for OFDM-based superchannel transmission system enabled by optical frequency combs. In this scheme, taking advantage of the broadband phase coherence provided by optical frequency combs among the OFDM-bands, the carrier phase retrieved from pilot-subcarriers of the OFDM-band on the central wavelength channel is reused for the OFDM-bands on the other wavelength channels. In this case, the overall pilot-subcarrier overhead and DSP complexity is significantly reduced since the pilot-subcarriers occupy a small fraction of the overall OFDM bandwidth. The feasibility of this joint-carrier phase tracking scheme has been verified successfully via comprehensive simulation, where results show that the BER threshold for soft-decision FEC could be achieved for 50GHz-spaced 5-band 4-QAM, 8-QAM, 16-QAM and 32-QAM OFDM-based superchannel signals with zero guard-band and both laser and nonlinear phase noise effects after 7000km, 4000km, 3000km and 2000km SSMF transmission respectively. The simulation results show that there exist chromatic dispersion-induced differential phase offset among the OFDM-bands whose impact on joint-carrier phase tracking depends on the modulation format, channel count and fiber length. Finally, we demonstrate experimentally the feasibility performance of the designed master-slave carrier phase tracking technique for comb-based OFDM-based superchannels.