Post-FEC Performance of Nondifferential Transmission in the Presence of Phase Noise

We assess the impact of phase noise on the bit error rate (BER) after forward error correction (FEC) decoding (post-FEC BER) and on the error distribution in the case of differential and nondifferential (ND) transmission. We show that the use of pilot symbols enables reliable ND transmission and relaxes the requirements on bit-interleaving, and therefore, on the end-to-end latency. Further, we provide guidelines for the design and choice of carrier recovery and FEC parameters to obtain good performance in typical scenarios. All presented results are achieved through the use of a high-speed system emulation platform based on field-programmable gate arrays and thus achieve high reliability even for very low post-FEC BER.