Unscented Kalman filters for polarization state tracking and phase noise mitigation.

Abstract

Simultaneous polarization and phase noise tracking and compensation is proposed based on an unscented Kalman filter (UKF). We experimentally demonstrate the tracking under noise-loading and after 800-km single-mode fiber transmission with 20-Gbaud QPSK and 16-QAM signals. These experiments show that the proposed UKF outperforms both conventional blind tracing algorithms and a previously proposed extended Kalman filter, at the cost of higher complexity. Additionally, we propose and test modified Kalman filter algorithms to reduce computational complexity.