Feed-forward frequency offset estimation for 32-QAM optical coherent detection

Due to the non-rectangular distribution of the constellation points, traditional fast Fourier transform based frequency offset estimation (FFT-FOE) is no longer suitable for 32-QAM signal. Here, we report a modified FFT-FOE technique by selecting and digitally amplifying the inner QPSK ring of 32-QAM after the adaptive equalization, which is defined as QPSK-selection assisted FFT-FOE. Simulation results show that no FOE error occurs with a FFT size of only 512 symbols, when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is above 17.5 dB using our proposed FOE technique. However, the error probability of traditional FFT-FOE scheme for 32-QAM is always intolerant. Finally, our proposed FOE scheme functions well for 10 Gbaud dual polarization (DP)-32-QAM signal to reach 20% forward error correction (FEC) threshold of BER= 2x10-2, under the scenario of back-to-back (B2B) transmission. (C) 2017 Optical Society of America