Laser linewidth and fiber nonlinearity tolerance study of C-16QAM compared to square 16QAM in coherent OFDM system

We introduced an effective modulation format circle 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (C-16QAM) to improve the laser linewidth induced phase noise and fiber nonlinear effects tolerance in coherent orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) system without other losses compared to square 16QAM. Although C-16QAM has improved the performance of single channel system with Viterbi-Viterbi carrier phase estimation, C-16QAM using in coherent OFDM system has not been performed and such configuration of system may solve many problems in the next generation access networks. Here we numerically studied two separate manifestations of phase noise generated by laser linewidth and fiber nonlinear effects. We take these two kinds of phase noise into consideration separately by investigating the influence of laser linewidth with fixed launch power into transmission fiber and the influence of fiber nonlinear effects with fixed laser linewidth. We find that the C-16QAM improves the laser linewidth induced phase noise significantly and improves fiber nonlinear effects tolerance to a certain degree compared to square 16QAM. This coherent C-16QAM OFDM system may have great prospects for the next generation access networks for these significantly improvements.