Adaptive Digital Equalization in Optical Coherent Receivers With Stokes-Space Update Algorithm

In this paper, we describe a novel update algorithm for the filter coefficients of the adaptive digital equalizer in coherent receivers, which is based on error signals evaluated in Stokes space and is insensitive to both phase-noise and frequency-offset. We also introduce an optimized decision rule in the Stokes space, which takes into account the exact statistics of noise and yields a performance improvement with respect to the minimum distance decision criterion. We compare the performance of the new algorithm to the standard constant-modulus algorithm (CMA) for polarization-multiplexed 16QAM modulation, achieving similar performance in the absence of phase noise, with comparable complexity. Differently from CMA, the proposed Stokes-space algorithm allows us to remove the phase offset between polarizations, thus enabling the use of a joint carrier-phase estimation algorithm on both polarizations, which in turns yields a nearly doubled phase noise tolerance.