Linear fiber impairments mitigation of 40-G bit/s polarization-multiplexed QPSK by digital processing in a coherent receiver

To provide higher capacity networks, 40-Gb/s transmission systems are under active development and their cost is on the way to be competitive with the one of 4 x 10 Gb/s. However, their lower tolerance to linear and nonlinear fiber impairments remains a major drawback for field deployment. To address the issue of linear impairments, coherent detection of multilevel formats with polarization division multiplexing appears as a promising solution by reducing the symbol rate to 10 Gbaud. Indeed, such coherent based systems have already demonstrated an improved tolerance to optical noise and an interesting capability to compensate for large amount of chromatic dispersion. In this paper, the tolerances to narrow optical filtering, chromatic dispersion, and polarization mode dispersion are investigated with coherent detection of 10-Gbaud quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) with and without polarization division multiplexing. Moreover, the efficient mitigation of these linear impairments by digital processing in a coherent receiver is demonstrated in an ultralong haul transmission (4080 km) of 40-Gb/s QPSK polarization multiplexed data.