Pilot-symbols-aided cycle slip mitigation for DP-16QAM optical communication systems

A pilot-symbols-aided phase unwrapping (PAPU), which utilizes the time-division multiplexed pilot symbols that are transmitted with data, is proposed to do cycle slip detection and correction with the carrier phase estimation (CPE). Numerical simulations for 10 Gbaud dual-polarization 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (DP-16QAM) systems show that the block averaging quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) partitioning with PAPU greatly eliminates the performance degradation caused by cycle slips, maintains a low CS probability with less influence of filter length, and achieves a bit-error-rate (BER) performance below soft-decision forward error correction (FEC) limit 2 × 10⁻² at 15 dB optical signal-to-noise ratio with only 1.56% overhead and 6 MHz combined laser linewidth.