Joint Phase Noise Compensation in Dual-Comb Assisted OFDM Receiver

Abstract

Optical frequency combs (OFC) have revolutionized the field of optics ranging from metrology to radio-frequency photonics. One of the main advantages of an OFC is its spectral purity and broadband phase coherence. An increase in comb linewidth corresponds to elevated phase noise and system performance degradation that mandates larger processing complexity. A specialized processing scheme relying on Vernier OFC pair seeded by a single laser has highly correlated tones over the entire processing band. Recognizing this fact, this report describes a low complexity joint phase noise compensation scheme for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) receiver assisted by dual combs. 4-QAM modulated OFDM signals with 60 subcarriers were demodulated using a dual-comb OFDM receiver. The experiment measured the error vector magnitude (EVM) to validate the receiver performance. The new joint phase noise compensation algorithm can effectively suppress phase noise for high order tones without pilot channels and was shown to be robust under variable SNR levels.