Carrier phase recovery in optical fiber communication systems using high-order modulation formats

Abstract

Nowadays, the coherent optical communication system plays an important role in communication field because of large capability and bandwidth. A coherent optical communication, based on high-order modulation and digital signal processing technologies, consists of optical transmitters, optical fiber lines, optical amplifiers and optical receivers. In the high-speed coherent optical communication system, the phase noise from the transmitter laser and the local oscillator laser can significantly degrade the performance of the signal transmission and detection, especially for the systems using high-order modulation format, such as m-ary phase shift keying (mPSK) and m-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (m-QAM). Therefore, investigations on laser phase noise compensation algorithm based on digital signal processing technologies has become more and more significant. In this work, a multi-ring carrier phase recovery algorithm is developed for compensating the laser phase noise in optical fiber communication systems using high-order modulation formats. Degradations on the performance of communication systems due to the laser phase noise have been investigated. The system performance using the proposed algorithm and the conventional Viterbi-Viterbi algorithm were also evaluated in 9-channel and 15- channel, 32-Gbaud, Nyquist-spaced QPSK, 16-QAM, 64-QAM and 256-QAM coherent transmission systems with considering the impact of the laser phase noise. It is found that the phase noise leads to stricter constraints on the linewidths of transmitter-side and receiver-side lasers, and it can greatly degrade the achievable information rates in communication systems. Besides, compared to the conventional Viterbi-Viterbi algorithm, which is usually applied in the QPSK system, our proposed algorithm can also well mitigate the laser phase noise in 16-QAM, 64-QAM and 256-QAM optical communication systems.