Phase noise estimation and mitigation for DCT-based coherent optical OFDM systems

Abstract

In this paper, as an attractive alternative to the conventional discrete Fourier transform (DFT) based orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), discrete cosine transform (DCT) based OFDM which has certain advantages over its counterpart is studied for optical fiber communications. As is known, laser phase noise is a major impairment to the performance of coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) systems. However, to our knowledge, detailed analysis of phase noise and the corresponding mitigation methods for DCT-based CO-OFDM systems have not been reported yet. To address these issues, we analyze the laser phase noise in the DCT-based CO-OFDM systems, and propose phase noise estimation and mitigation schemes. Numerical results show that the proposal is very effective in suppressing phase noise and could significantly improve the performance of DCT-based CO-OFDM systems.