Efficient Direct Detection of Twin Single-Sideband Quadrature-Phase Shift Keying Using a Single Detector with Hierarchical Blind-Phase Search

Abstract

We propose a novel reception scheme for twin single-sideband (twin-SSB) signals using just a single photodetector (PD), significantly reducing the system complexity and cost. To detect a twin-SSB with power-unbalanced quadrature-phase shift keying (QPSK) sidebands upon detection via a single PD at the receiver side, two QPSKs carried in two sidebands are coherently superposed and detected in a 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) format. This technique notably diminishes the linearity and effective number of bits required for the transmitter components in high-speed optical transmission systems. Moreover, a hierarchical blind-phase search (HBPS) algorithm is proposed to compensate for the imperfect phase rotation of QPSK signals during transmission. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, we successfully conducted simulations of 112 Gb/s 16-QAM signal transmission over a 10 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF), achieving bit error ratios (BERs) of 7.84×10−4, well below the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold of 3.8×10−3. In addition, the synthetic transmission scheme proposed in this paper is compared with the traditional 16-QAM signal transmission scheme, and the results show that the proposed scheme does not introduce a performance cost with the same received optical power (ROP) and transmission distance.