Enhanced 16 Spiral quadrature amplitude modulation scheme for coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems

Abstract

We propose an enhanced 16 Spiral quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) (16 E-Spiral QAM) scheme to overcome the laser phase noise in a coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) system. Considering both additive white Gaussian noise and large phase noise, 16 E-Spiral QAM schemes have a better transmission performance compared to conventional 16 QAM CO-OFDM systems. The simulated results show that the required optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of the proposed 16 QAM is, respectively, 0.8 and 2.3 dB less than 16 Spiral and conventional 16 QAM at a bit error rate (BER) of 10−3 in a back-to-back case. After 800-km transmission over a single-mode fiber, the tolerance for the laser linewidth of the 16 E-Spiral QAM can improve about 30 kHz with an OSNR of 18 dB compared to that of a conventional 16 QAM.