Improved pilot-aided optical carrier phase recovery using average processing for pilot phase estimation

We propose and numerically investigate an improved pilot-aided (PA) optical carrier phase recovery (CPR) method using average processing for pilot phase estimation in order to suppress the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise in PA coherent transmission systems. Extensive simulations for 28 Gbuad QPSK systems are implemented. The performance of proposed PA-CPR with averaging is comprehensively investigated and compared with PA-CPR without averaging and Viterbi & Viterbi phase estimation (VVPE). Results show that, PA-CPR with averaging can significantly improve the performance of PA-CPR without averaging, and the best averaging length in the average operation is determined by trading off between ASE noise and laser phase noise (PN). By comparing the optical-signal-to-noise-ratio (OSNR) penalties at bit error rate (BER) of 1 × 10−3 using PA-CPR without averaging, PA-CPR with averaging and VVPE, the advantage of PA-CPR with averaging is further confirmed. Quantitatively, the tolerable linewidth-symbol-duration products (Δf · T) at 1-dB OSNR penalty by using PA-CPR without averaging, VVPE, and PA-CPR with averaging are 6 × 10−5, 1.2 × 10−4, and 5 × 10−4, respectively.

► An improved pilot-aided optical carrier phase recovery method is proposed. ► The proposed method can suppress the ASE noise effect using average operation. ► Simulations for 28 Gbuad coherent QPSK transmission systems are implemented. ► The improved method has better phase noise tolerance than the original method. ► Optimal averaging length is obtained by trading off between ASE and phase noise.