High Spectral efficiency PM-128QAM Comb-Based Superchannel Transmission Enabled by a Single Shared Optical Pilot Tone
Journal article, 2018

We exploit the coherence of frequency combs for high spectral efficiency superchannel transmission via effective sharing of a single pilot tone. By phase-locking the receiver comb to the transmitted pilot tone, carrier offsets are suppressed while both the overhead and complexity associated with the pilot tone are reduced. We form a 55 carrier superchannel using a 25-GHz spaced electro-optic frequency comb seeded by a 100-kHz linewidth laser. At a pilot tone overhead of <2%, the reduction in carrier offsets is shown to facilitate blind DSP-based carrier recovery of all 54 × 24 Gbaud PM-128QAM data channels. The resulting superchannel spectral efficiency is 10.3 bits/s/Hz assuming a 28% overhead for forward error correction. Our results show the potential for optical pilot tones to reduce both overhead and complexity in systems using comb-based superchannels together with high-order modulation formats.

coherent communications

Analog optical signal processing

homodyning

Author

Mikael Mazur

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Abel Lorences Riesgo

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Jochen Schröder

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Peter Andrekson

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Magnus Karlsson

Chalmers, Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Photonics

Journal of Lightwave Technology

0733-8724 (ISSN) 1558-2213 (eISSN)

Vol. 36 6 1318-1325

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Telecommunications

Communication Systems

Signal Processing

DOI

10.1109/JLT.2017.2786750

More information

Latest update

4/12/2018