Phase Noise Estimation and Suppression for PDM CO-OFDM/OQAM Systems

Phase noise induced common phase error and inter-carrier-interference are serious impairments for coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) systems. As have been discussed in previous publications, extra signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) penalty is required to maintain the system performance under the interference of laser phase noise. The SNR penalty is proportional to the laser linewidth, the time duration of an OFDM symbol, and the system SNR. Therefore, the phase noise induced interference remains the bottleneck for CO-OFDM systems, especially for those systems employing high-order modulation formats, or with long fast Fourier transform window. Thanks to the usage of specially designed filter banks, CO-OFDM/offset quadrature amplitude modulation (CO-OFDM/OQAM) systems demonstrate lower out-of-band leakage and higher spectral efficiency compared with conventional CO-OFDM systems. Recently, both theoretical studies and experimental demonstrations for CO-OFDM/OQAM systems have been widely reported. With the relaxation of orthogonal condition from the complex field to the real field, phase noised induced interference in CO-OFDM/OQAM systems is more complicated than that in conventional CO-OFDM systems. To our best knowledge, there have been no studies on the phase noise estimation and suppression methods for CO-OFDM/OQAM systems. In this paper, we systematically study and analyze phase noise induced interference for CO-OFDM/OQAM systems. Based on the theoretical analysis and the concept of orthogonal basis expansion, we develop a time-domain phase noise estimation and suppression method for polarization-division-multiplexed CO-OFDM/OQAM systems. As shown in numerical Montel Carlo simulations, the proposed method can improve the system robustness against phase noise effectively.