Carrier-to-signal Power Ratio Research Articles

Bias control for optical single-sideband transmitter based on single IQ modulator

The optical in-phase and quadrature modulator (IQM) is typically utilized as an optical single-sideband (SSB) transmitter for its simple structure and low cost. It requires the modulator biases to be slightly offset for generating the optical carrier. However, this poses significant challenges in the bias control circuits, as most off-the-shelf automatic bias control (ABC) modules are designed to stabilize the IQM at its carrier suppression point for coherent optical communication. In this paper, a novel arbitrary ABC scheme is proposed to stabilize the carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) of an optical SSB signal over long-term operation. This scheme uses SSB rather than double-sideband (DSB) sinusoidal signals as the dither signals. It does not violate the minimum phase condition, thus avoiding performance penalties compared to the conventional ABC scheme in which the DSB dither signal is used. We also develop a closed-form expression to reveal the relationship between the control parameter in the ABC algorithm and the CSPR of the optical SSB signal. By this means, the optical SSB transmitter can automatically adjust its bias voltages and stabilize them at a given CSPR value. The experimental results with ∼80 Gb/s optical SSB signal show that our proposed ABC scheme is effective in stabilizing the bias of the IQM at any point and maintains the CSPR value of the optical SSB signal over hours. It is also shown that the proposed method leads to 1 dB improvement in the receiver sensitivity compared with the traditional ABC technique.

Carrier-assisted differential detection receiver with low carrier-to-signal power ratio employing parallel multi delay

We propose a parallel multi delay (PMD) carrier-assisted differential detection (CADD) receiver for the first time, including PMD asymmetric-CADD (PMD A-CADD) and PMD symmetric-CADD (PMD S-CADD). The transfer function of the PMD CADD receiver is optimized by expanding the number of optical delays to a general selection, thereby suppressing the signal-signal beat interference (SSBI). As a result, the required carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) is reduced, and the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) sensitivity is drastically improved. Two schemes for further mitigation of residual SSBI are introduced, namely SSBI iterative cancellation algorithm and the increased guard band mitigation method. For SSBI iterative cancellation algorithm, by optimizing the number of optical delays, the optimal CSPR for the P6D A-CADD and the P5D S-CADD can be reduced to −1 dB, the required number of iterations is only 3, and compared with the parallel dual delay-based asymmetric-CADD (PDD A-CADD) receiver, the OSNR sensitivity is improved by about 4.5 dB. For the increased guard band mitigation method, 2.34 GHz and 3.16 GHz guard band are required for the P6D A-CADD and the P5D S-CADD to meet the 7% FEC threshold at 0 dB CSPR.

Joint signal-to-signal beat interference mitigation for the field recovery of symmetric carrier-assisted differential detection with low carrier-to-signal power ratio

As a combination of direct detection and coherent detection technologies, self-coherent detection has the advantages of low cost and optical field recovery ability. However, most of the self-coherent detection techniques are limited to single sideband (SSB) signals. Recently, carrier-assisted differential detection (CADD) has been proposed to realize complex-valued double sideband (DSB) signals, but it requires a high carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) to mitigate the signal-to-signal beat interference (SSBI). Later, a more cost-effective symmetric CADD (S-CADD) has been proposed while the required CSPR is still high. In order to alleviate the high requirements of CSPR, we propose a scheme based on the joint of digital pre-distortion (DPD) at transmitter and clipping at receiver to further improve the S-CADD system performance. This joint processing can not only solve the problem of non-uniform distribution of subcarrier signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) caused by non-ideal transfer function, but also the error propagation problem caused by enhanced SSBI under low CSPR. After the validation of the 64 Gbaud 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal transmitted over 80 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF), the CSPR required by the proposed scheme to reach the 20% soft decision-forward error correction (SD-FEC) and 7% hard decision-forward error correction (HD-FEC) can be reduced by 1.3 dB and 2.8 dB, respectively, with a comparison of the conventional S-CADD. The results show the potential of the proposed scheme in the short-reach optical transmissions.

Filter-assisted direct detection-based field recovery scheme for complex-valued double-sideband signals

Double-sideband self-coherent detection (DSB-SCD) can achieve optical field recovery of complex-valued double-sideband (CV-DSB) signals without a local oscillator laser. To date, various proposed DSB-SCD schemes require a high carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) to mitigate the inherent signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) induced by direct detection. Aiming at relaxing the high CSPR requirement for the DSB-SCD, filter-assisted direct detection (FADD) is proposed to retrieve the CV-DSB signals. In this paper, we clarify the concept of the FADD, which uses optical filters in the receiver to achieve optical field recovery of CV-DSB signals via direct detection. The CV-DSB signals can be retrieved at low CSPR with the aid of optical filters. We also propose a novel FADD receiver that uses an optical bandstop filter (OBSF) to obtain CV-DSB signals from self-coherent signals, called OBSF-DD with 90° hybrid. Considering the high complexity of the OBSF-DD with 90° hybrid, a simplified OBSF-DD receiver with 2 × 2 coupler is put forward as well, which uses a 2 × 2 coupler instead of optical hybrid, and three single-ended photodiodes are required to achieve signal reception. By using cost-effective FADD receiver, the proposed FADD scheme provides an effective approach for low CSPR field recovery.

PDM-SHD NFDM transmission with envelope-detection feedback polarization tracking and optical injection locking.

Nonlinear frequency division multiplexing (NFDM) systems, especially the eigenvalue communications have the potential to overcome the nonlinear Shannon capacity limit. However, the baud rate of eigenvalue communications is typically restricted to a few GBaud, making it challenging to mitigate laser frequency impairments such as the phase noise and frequency offset (FO) using digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms in intradyne detections (IDs). Therefore, we introduce the polarization division multiplexing-self-homodyne detection (PDM-SHD) into the NFDM link, which could overcome the impact of phase noise and FO by transmitting a pilot carrier originating from the transmitter laser to the receiver through the orthogonal polarization state of signal. To separate the signal from the carrier at the receiver, a carrier to signal power ratio (CSPR) unrestricted adaptive polarization controlling strategy is proposed and implemented by exploiting the optical intensity fluctuation of the light in a particular polarization rather than its direct optical power as the feedback. Optical injection locking (OIL) is used subsequently to amplify optical power of pilot carrier and mitigate the impact of signal-signal beat interference (SSBI). Additionally, the effects of cross-polarization modulation (XPolM) and modulation instability (MI) in long haul transmission are explored and inhibited. The results show that the tolerable FO range is about 3.5 GHz, which is 17 times larger than the ID one. When 16-amplitude phase shift keying (APSK) or 64-APSK constellations are used, identical Q-factor performance can be obtained by using distributed feedback (DFB, ∼10 MHz) laser, external cavity laser (ECL, ∼100kHz), or fiber laser (FL, ∼100 Hz), respectively, which demonstrates that our proposed PDM-SHD eigenvalue communication structure is insensitive to the laser linewidth. Under the impact of cycle slip, the Q-factor difference of 16-APSK signal between the ECL-ID system and ECL-SHD system can be up to 8.73 dB after 1500 km transmission.

Deep-Learning-Enabled Direct Detection With Reduced Computational Complexity and High Electrical-Spectral-Efficiency

Complex-valued double-sideband (CV-DSB) direct detection (DD) is a promising solution for high capacity and cost-sensitive data center interconnects, since it can reconstruct the optical field as a homodyne coherent receiver while does not require a costly local oscillator laser. In a carrier-assisted CV-DSB DD system, the carrier occupies a large proportion of the total optical signal power but bears no information. Reducing the carrier to signal power ratio (CSPR) can improve the information-bearing signal power and thus maximize the achievable system performance. Recently, we have proposed and demonstrated a deep-learning-enabled DD (DLEDD) scheme to reconstruct the full-field of the CV-DSB signal. In the DLEDD scheme, the optical CV-DSB signal was detected by a dispersion-diversity receiver and then recovered by a deep convolutional neural network (CNN). Nevertheless, the computational complexity of the deep CNN is the main obstacle to the application of the DLEDD scheme. In this paper, we demonstrate a 50-GBaud CV-DSB 32-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (32-QAM) signal transmission over 80-km single-mode fiber with ∼64% computational-budget reduction in the field reconstruction. This is achieved by using 1×1 convolutions to attain a sparse dimensionality (in particular the number of channels) of the deep CNN. To the best of our knowledge, we achieve the highest electrical spectral efficiency of 7.07 b/s/Hz per polarization per wavelength for a CV-DSB DD receiver without requiring a sharp-roll-off optical filter.

Field recovery via simplified carrier-assisted differential detection with interleaved subcarrier loading scheme at low CSPR condition.

In this Letter, we propose a simplified carrier-assisted differential detection (CADD) receiver with interleaved subcarrier loading scheme to further reduce the system hardware complexity while preserving the capability of field recovery of double sideband (DSB) complex-valued signals at the low carrier to signal power ratio (CSPR) condition. The numerical results show that the simplified CADD receiver requires less gap subcarriers to achieve a bit-error-rate (BER) below the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) limit of 3.8 × 10-3 as compared with a conventional CADD receiver. Despite the robustness to the time delay fluctuation decreases, which can be avoided using time-independent components in place of time delay line, more than a 3.2-dB optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) gain can be obtained regardless of CSPR.

Offset double-sideband signal field recovery at low CSPR using filter-assisted direct detection

The offset double-sideband (DSB) scheme has attracted attention because it can achieve field recovery at low carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) and improve the spectral efficiency (SE) of self-coherent detection. In this paper, an offset DSB filter-assisted direct detection (FADD) scheme is proposed and studied for the first time, which uses an optical bandpass filter (OBPF) to filter out the optical carrier as the local oscillator for the receiver. As such, signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) can be eliminated. Since the offset DSB signal has a large frequency gap, the requirement for the bandwidth of the OBPF is not high. The performance of the proposed offset DSB FADD scheme is evaluated for 16-QAM signals. It is comprehensively compared with offset DSB carrier-assisted differential detection (CADD) scheme in terms of OSNR sensitivity, optimal CSPR, and receiver power sensitivity. In addition, the effect of frequency gap compression is significant as SSBI is completely eliminated from the system, thereby utilizing as many low-frequency resources as possible and improving SE. Finally, the proposed offset DSB FADD scheme is resilient to the wavelength offset up to several GHz between the transmitter laser and the center wavelength of the OBPF.

Deep Learning-Based Phase Retrieval Scheme for Minimum-Phase Signal Recovery

We propose a deep learning-based phase retrieval method to accurately reconstruct the optical field of a single-sideband minimum-phase signal from the directly detected intensity waveform. Our method relies on a fully convolutional Neural Network (NN) model to realize non-iterative and robust phase retrieval. The NN is trained so that it performs full-field reconstruction and jointly compensates for transmission impairments. Compared to the recently proposed Kramers-Kronig (KK) receiver, our method avoids the distortions introduced by the nonlinear operations involved in the KK phase-retrieval algorithm and hence does not require digital upsampling. We validate the proposed phase-retrieval method by means of extensive numerical simulations in relevant system settings, and we compare the performance of the proposed scheme with the conventional KK receiver operated with a 4-fold digital upsampling. The results show that the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold at BER 3.8e-3 can be achieved with up to 2.8 dB lower carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) value and 1.8 dB better receiver sensitivity compared to the conventional 4-fold upsampled KK receiver. We also present a comparative analysis of the complexity of the proposed scheme with that of the KK receiver, showing that the proposed scheme can achieve the 7% HD-FEC threshold with 1.6 dB lower CSPR, 0.4 dB better receiver sensitivity, and 36% lower complexity.

Offset double sideband carrier assisted differential detection with field recovery at low carrier-to-signal power ratio.

Four system frameworks based on carrier assisted differential detection (CADD) receivers for offset double sideband (DSB) signal transmission, including offset DSB asymmetric CADD (offset DSB A-CADD), offset DSB symmetric CADD (offset DSB S-CADD), offset DSB parallel double delay asymmetric CADD (offset DSB PDD-A-CADD), and offset DSB parallel double delay symmetric CADD (offset DSB PDD-S-CADD) are proposed to reduce the requirement for carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) and improve the spectral efficiency (SE) of the self-coherent detection. These frameworks accommodate signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) and efficiently solve the noise enhancement by placing a frequency gap as wide as the signal bandwidth in the middle of the left and right sideband signal. Massive theoretical derivation and simulation verification illustrated that compared with previous interleaved A-CADD, our system achieve field recovery under the condition of 0 dB CSPR with the improvement of SE by 5%, and the OSNR sensitivity is improved by 4.5 dB with 20% forward error correction (FEC) threshold. In addition, due to the devices' limited bandwidth (BW), the information-bearing signal is attenuated at the high-frequency region. And since SSBI has less influence on the signal in the high-frequency region, the frequency gap of the four offset DSB CADD schemes are compressed to utilize as much low-frequency resource as possible and improve the SE. Efficient compression of the frequency gap from 50% to 32.3% with 20% FEC threshold and 50% to 37.7% with 7% FEC threshold at 0 dB CSPR is achieved, and only a slight performance degradation is observed. At this time, the SE is improved by 22.7% and 17.3% with different FEC thresholds, respectively, compared with the 5% frequency gap interleaved A-CADD.

Symbol-interleaved precoding technique for DDO-OFDM systems with the KK receiver.

Receiver sensitivity of direct-detection optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (DDO-OFDM) systems can be significantly improved by using the Kramers-Kronig (KK) receiver. However, the KK algorithm is sensitive to the high signal-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the OFDM signal, which may violate the minimum phase condition (MPC) and lead to severe signal distortions during the optical field reconstruction. Channel-independent discrete Fourier transform (DFT) precoding technique can efficiently reduce the PAPR and realize subcarrier signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) equalization, but the PAPR of the precoded signal will increase due to chromatic dispersion. Besides, the relevant researches exhibit that it is hard to accurately reconstruct the complex field from the sampled signals based on KK relation at the low carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) even if the MPC is satisfied. To combat the signal distortions induced by the KK algorithm and improve the bit error rate (BER) performance, we propose and verify DFT/Walsh-Hadamard transform (WHT)-based precoding with a simple symbol-interleaving technique for DDO-OFDM transmission systems. In addition to PAPR reduction, the proposed technique can equalize both subcarrier and inter-symbol SNRs efficiently. The simulated results show that the BER performance can be improved by up to one order of magnitude at a CSPR of 6 dB after up to 1000km single-mode fiber transmission, compared to the conventional DFT precoding technique. It is expected that the proposed technique can be employed to improve the receiver sensitivity of medium-reach DDO-OFDM transmission systems with the KK receiver.

Deep-learning-enabled high-performance full-field direct detection with dispersion diversity.

Data center interconnects require cost-effective photonic integrated optical transceivers to meet the ever-increasing capacity demands. Compared with a coherent transmission system, a complex-valued double-sideband (CV-DSB) direct detection (DD) system can minimize the cost of the photonic circuit, since it replaces two stable narrow-linewidth lasers with only a low-cost un-cooled laser in the transmitter while maintaining a similar spectral efficiency. In the carrier-assisted DD system, the carrier power accounts for a large proportion of the total optical signal power. Reducing the carrier to signal power ratio (CSPR) can improve the information-bearing signal power and thus the achievable system performance. To date, the minimum required CSPR is ∼7 dB for all the reported CV-DSB DD systems having electrical bandwidths of approximately half of baud rates. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning-enabled DD (DLEDD) scheme to recover the full optical field of the transmitted signal at a low CSPR of 2 dB in experiment. Our proposal is based on a dispersion-diversity receiver with an electrical bandwidth of ∼61.0% baud rate and a high tolerance to laser wavelength drift. A deep convolutional neural network enables accurate signal recovery in the presence of a strong signal-signal beat interference. Compared with the conventional method, the proposed DLEDD scheme can reduce the optimum CSPR by ∼8 dB, leading to a significant signal-to-noise ratio improvement of ∼5.8 dB according to simulation results. We experimentally demonstrate the optical field reconstruction for a 28-GBaud 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation signal after 80-km single-mode fiber transmission based on the proposed DLEDD scheme with a 2-dB optimum CSPR. The results show that the proposed DLEDD scheme could offer a high-performance solution for cost-sensitive applications such as data center interconnects, metro networks, and mobile fronthaul systems.

Optimizing DC restoration in Kramers-Kronig optical single-sideband receivers.

Kramers-Kronig optical single-sideband receivers remove the signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) that occurs when detecting a signal that has electrical signals mapped onto its optical field at the transmitter; such signals support electronic dispersion compensation without the need for a coherent receiver. To use the full range of the analog-to-digital converter's (ADC) range, it is best to a.c.-couple the photocurrent, to remove its DC content; however, the DC must be restored digitally before the KK algorithm is applied. Recent publications have concentrated on perfectly determining the restored DC's required level from the signal, with a view this is optimal for lowering error rates. In this paper, we investigate signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) cancellation in a single photodiode receiver using Kramers-Kronig receiver algorithm, with large variations in optical carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) and DC offset level. Through simulations and experiments, we find a strategy to optimize the signal quality without the need of an extensive search for the DC offset value. We also find that a theoretically perfect determination of the original DC level does not provide best signal quality especially for low CSPRs; in order to achieve maximum cancellation of signal-signal beat interference, the level of the restored DC has an optimum value that depends on the optical CSPR. We define a digital CSPR, which is the value of the CSPR in the digital domain after DC restoration. Our measurements show that we simply need to bias the signal upwards and make the minimum signal above zero by 0.1% of the r.m.s. signal amplitude when the optical CSPR is low. For higher values of optical CSPR, the optimal digital CSPR is about 2-dB lower than the optical CSPR, and the optimal DC offset can be calculated from this digital CSPR. We find that the boundary between our low optical CSPR region and high optical CSPR region depends on the noise level in the system.

Impact of the carrier contribution factor in the self-coherent DC-value method

The carrier contribution factor (CCF) is used in the DC-value method to assure the minimum phase condition (MPC) at the transmitter. We analyze the impact of the CCF estimation accuracy at the receiver on the DC-value system performance. We found that the CCF estimation accuracy at the receiver should be within ±5% to exploit all advantages of the DC-value method. We propose an accurate method to estimate the CCF at the receiver that works effectively with both direct current (DC) and alternating current (AC) coupled photodetectors. We experimentally validate the proposed method employing a 24 GBaud 16QAM signal. The experimental results show that the minimum BER value can be approached within ±5% offset of the estimated CCF value almost independently of the carrier to signal power ratio (CSPR) value. The proposed method can also be used to reconstruct the DC component in other minimum phase signal self-coherent techniques, such as the Kramers-Kronig receiver.

A Study on Sampling Penalties Reduction of Kramers-Kronig Receivers

Kramers-Kronig (KK) relation-based receiver can recover the field using a single-photodiode. However, the KK receiver requires a high carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR), and digital signal processing performed a few times faster than the Nyquist sampling rate. We propose a method to relax the requirements for sampling rate and CSPR by using digital upsampling with harmonic filtering. In the proposed method, log calculation of the KK algorithm is preceded by digital upsampling and followed by harmonics elimination and downsampling, respectively. Our results predict that the combination of digital upsampling and harmonic elimination can comply with the requirement of 2 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">nd</sup> generation FEC limit in 16-QAM 40-km transmission with the following signal parameters, CSPR 6.7 dB, ADC sampling rate 2.5 sps, digital upsampling 3 sps. We propose performing harmonic elimination in combination with Hilbert transform using a single finite impulse response (FIR) filter to increase computation efficiency. Compared with the frequency-domain implementation, similar performances were observed for FIR filters of length 33 or higher.

Enhanced CSPR for a multichannel Kramers-Kronig receiver by self-seeded stimulated Brillouin scattering.

We demonstrate carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) enhancement by self-seeded stimulated Brillouin scattering to improve the performance of Kramers-Kronig (KK) detection for multichannel single-sideband (SSB) signals. By virtue of low-CSPR transmission and high-CSPR detection, our proposed scheme effectively advances system performance by reducing propagation-induced distortion while maintaining the minimum phase condition. We experimentally demonstrate the improvement in CSPR and bit error rate of 5×10-Gbaud 16-QAM SSB signals by applying the carrier recovery block after 80-km transmission. Under optimum pump power, the average Q factor improvement of all five channels is 3.0 dB. We also analyze the performances of different channels and the major limiting factor. The results verify that our scheme offers a promising solution to enhance SSB self-coherent KK detection in wavelength-division multiplexing systems.

Carrier assisted differential detection with a generalized transfer function.

Direct detection capable of optical field recovery not only enables high-order modulation for high spectral efficiency (SE) but also extends the transmission reach by digital compensation of linear channel impairments such as chromatic dispersion. Recently, to bridge the gap between direct detection and coherent detection, carrier assisted differential detection (CADD) has been proposed for the reception of complex-valued double-sideband signals. In this paper, we extend the concept CADD to a general selection of the transfer functions, beyond the originally-proposed delay interferometer. To validate the proposed CADD approach, we utilize an optical filter based on silicon photonics microring resonator (MRR) as one realization of the generalized transfer functions. With the MRR based optical filter, both the required carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) and the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) sensitivity are drastically improved over the conventional CADD due to the significantly suppressed signal-signal beating interference (SSBI). In addition, the proposed CADD is resilient to the wavelength offset up to several GHz between the transmitter laser and the center wavelength of the MRR based optical filter. With the proposed transfer function, CADD provides a novel approach for achieving high-SE transmission with superior receiver sensitivity and could be potentially useful for inter-/intra-datacenter or mobile front haul applications.

Theoretical and Experimental Investigations of Interleaved Carrier-Assisted Differential Detection

Self-coherent detection is a promising solution for extending the transmission reach for direct detection system. For these schemes, high carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) is usually required to mitigate the inherent signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) induced from direct detection. Recently, carrier-assisted differential detection (CADD) receiver has been proposed to recover the optical field of complex-valued double sideband (DSB) signals via direct detection. Aiming at relaxing the high CSPR requirement for self-coherent detection systems, we propose an interleaved subcarrier loading scheme for double-sideband signals. At transmitter, only odd subcarriers are loaded with data while even subcarriers are left unused. By utilizing the CADD receiver, signal can be retrieved without the degradation of SSBI, which enables optical field recovery at low CSPRs. In this article, we first show by theory and simulation that the proposed scheme can work under lower CSPRs than the previous SSB self-coherent systems. Meanwhile, the electrical spectral efficiency of the proposed interleaved CADD is almost the same as SSB self-coherent systems. We also illustrate the process of parameter optimization for interleaved CADD, including optical delay, CSPR, and frequency gap. We successfully transmit 100-Gbps 16-QAM OFDM signals over 160-km uncompensated standard single mode fiber (SSMF) at 3.5-dB CSPR.

Power-Efficient Single-Sideband Transmission With Clipped Iterative SSBI Cancellation

Distributed data-center networks rely on power and cost-efficient high-speed fiber optical connections over distances up to 80 km which can be densely wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) in the C-band. Recently, single-sideband (SSB) direct detection (DD) has been considered as an attractive transmission scheme for achieving data rates beyond 100 Gb/s per channel over 80 km. The advantages of SSB DD transmission include its simple transceiver architecture and its capability of electronic dispersion compensation. However, SSB transmissions require a carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) of around 10 dB, even when signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) cancellations are applied. This high CSPR value reduces the power efficiency of the system and limits the total number of WDM channels and accordingly the total system capacity due to power limitation of optical amplifiers. In this article, we propose an iterative SSBI cancellation scheme, which can be effectively applied without digital upsampling at low CSPR values. Using this technique, we have experimentally demonstrated a 30 Gbaud 128 QAM SSB direct detection transmission over 80 km with a low CSPR of 5 dB, showing 4.6 dB performance improvement compared to the Kramers–Kronig scheme operated without digital upsampling.

DC Component Recovery in Kramers-Kronig Receiver Utilizing AC-Coupled Photo-Detector

The Kramers-Kronig (KK) receiver has recently drawn a great deal of attention due to its capability to extract the complex-valued electric field of optical signal from the directly detected signal. One practical issue is the recovery of the DC component lost upon the reception using an AC-coupled photo-detector. Due to the nonlinear operation of KK algorithm, it is necessary to recover the DC value of the signal before executing the algorithm. A common method to estimate the DC component was to sweep the DC value added to the detected signal, while measuring the system performance metrics such as bit-error ratio (BER). In this article, we propose and demonstrate a simple one-step DC recovery method for KK receiver. By inserting a zero-padded preamble in the modulation data and measuring a couple of statistical averages of the detected AC-coupled signal, we can estimate the DC component accurately even when the carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSPR) is low. Thus, this method estimates the DC component rapidly without time-consuming and power-hungry signal processing such as demodulation and BER calculation. We carry out a series of computer simulations and experiments to measure the accuracy of the proposed method. The results show that the proposed method incurs negligible sensitivity penalties compared with the conventional DC-sweep method. Also, provided in this paper is the design guideline on the proposed method.