We present a lookup table (LUT)-free carrier recovery architecture for intradyne optical DPSK receivers that reduce the required digital signal processing hardware resources, power consumption as well as total process clocks, aimed at cost-effective transceivers for access networks applications. The proposed architecture simplifies frequency compensation algorithm to avoid using m th-power operation and LUTs. We prototyped the proposed carrier recovery on a commercial FPGA for real-time evaluation with data at 1.25 Gb/s. The optical transmission system is implemented by direct-phase modulation of commercial DFB lasers, 25 km of single-mode fiber, and a coherent receiver with low-cost optical front-end based on 3 × 3 coupler and three photodiodes providing phase-diversity operation. Results show high performance in real-time, achieving –54 dBm sensitivity at BER = 10–3 as well as feed-forward frequency error correction, high robustness against the fast frequency laser drifts, and high tolerance to optical phase noise in a 6.25 GHz spaced ultradense wavelength division multiplexing grid.