EEPN and CD study for coherent optical nPSK and nQAM systems with RF pilot based phase noise compensation

A radio frequency (RF) carrier can be used to mitigate the phase noise impact in n-level PSK and QAM systems. The systems performance is influenced by the use of an RF pilot carrier to accomplish phase noise compensation through complex multiplication in combination with discrete filters to compensate for the chromatic dispersion (CD). We perform a detailed study comparing two filters for the CD compensation namely the fixed frequency domain equalizer (FDE) filter and the adaptive least-mean-square (LMS) filter. The study provides important novel physical insight into the equalization enhanced phase noise (EEPN) influence on the system bit-error-rate (BER) versus optical signal-to-noise-ratio (OSNR) performance. Important results of the analysis are that the FDE filter position relative to the RF carrier phase noise compensation module provides a possibility for choosing whether the EEPN from the Tx or the LO laser influences the system quality. The LMS filter works very inefficiently when placed prior to the RF phase noise compensation stage of the Rx whereas it works much more efficiently and gives almost the same performance as the FDE filter when placed after the RF phase noise compensation stage.