Numerical analysis of 50 Gbaud homodyne coherent receivers relying on line-coding and injection locking in lasers

•It studies the performance of coherent receivers relying on injection locked local oscillators.•It focuses on the impact that receiver lasers have on the performance.•It proves that the technique is feasible with reasonable power penalty.

We present a numerical analysis of 50 Gbaud coherent detection enabled by injection locked lasers and line coding. The coherent receiver was tested with respect to an ideal receiver for two higher order modulation formats (16-QAM, QPSK) and under diverse operating regimes relating to the slave laser linewidth properties, the injection level and the frequency detuning between the incoming signal and the slave laser. The impact of the slave laser properties and line coding techniques on the receiver performance is highlighted showing that the technique could be used as a practical solution in order to enable low-cost and short reach n × 100 Gb/s Ethernet communication systems with the potential of flexibility in terms of the data rate.