Low-complexity optical phase noise suppression in CO-OFDM system using recursive principal components elimination

A low-complexity optical phase noise suppression approach based on recursive principal components elimination, R-PCE, is proposed and theoretically derived for CO-OFDM systems. Through frequency domain principal components estimation and elimination, signal distortion caused by optical phase noise is mitigated by R-PCE. Since matrix inversion and domain transformation are completely avoided, compared with the case of the orthogonal basis expansion algorithm (L = 3) that offers a similar laser linewidth tolerance, the computational complexities of multiple principal components estimation are drastically reduced in the R-PCE by factors of about 7 and 5 for q = 3 and 4, respectively. The feasibility of optical phase noise suppression with the R-PCE and its decision-aided version (DA-R-PCE) in the QPSK/16QAM CO-OFDM system are demonstrated by Monte-Carlo simulations, which verify that R-PCE with only a few number of principal components q (= 3) provides a significantly larger laser linewidth tolerance than conventional algorithms, including the common phase error compensation algorithm and linear interpolation algorithm. Numerical results show that the optimal performance of R-PCE and DA-R-PCE can be achieved with a moderate q, which is beneficial for low-complexity hardware implementation. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America