Multistage Carrier Phase Estimation Algorithms for Phase Noise Mitigation in 64-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation Optical Systems

Two novel low-complexity multistage digital feed-forward carrier phase estimation algorithms for 64-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) are proposed and analyzed by numerical simulations. The first stage is composed of a Viterbi and Viterbi block, based on either the standard quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) partitioning algorithm using only Class-1 symbols or a modified QPSK partitioning scheme utilizing both Class-1 and outer most triangle-edge symbols. The second stage applies the Viterbi and Viterbi algorithm after a 64-QAM-to-QPSK transformation, while the subsequent stages iterate a maximum likelihood estimation algorithm for phase estimation. All proposed techniques are characterized by a high tolerance to laser phase noise: with an optical signal-to-noise ratio penalty of 1 dB at bit error rate of 10^-2, the proposed schemes can tolerate a linewidth times symbol duration product (Δv·T_s) equal to 5.6 × 10^-5 and 7.1 × 10^-5, respectively. At 32 Gbaud, all of the above linewidth requirements can be met using commercial tunable lasers. The proposed schemes achieve a similar linewidth tolerance with a reduced implementation complexity with respect to algorithms based on the blind phase search method.