Compensation of Laser Frequency Fluctuations and Phase Noise in 16-QAM Coherent Receivers

Frequency fluctuations caused by mechanical vibrations, power supply noise, and other mechanisms are detrimental to the phase estimator performance in high speed intradyne coherent optical receivers. In this letter, we propose the use of a low-latency parallel digital phase lock loop in combination with common feed-forward carrier phase recovery algorithms in order to compensate both the phase noise and laser frequency fluctuation effects on 16-quadrature amplitude modulation receivers. Numerical results demonstrate the excellent behavior of the proposed two-stage carrier recovery scheme.