Field recovery via simplified carrier-assisted differential detection with interleaved subcarrier loading scheme at...

In this Letter, we propose a simplified carrier-assisted differential detection (CADD) receiver with interleaved subcarrier loading scheme to further reduce the system hardware complexity while preserving the capability of field recovery of double sideband (DSB) complex-valued signals at the low carrier to signal power ratio (CSPR) condition. The numerical results show that the simplified CADD receiver requires less gap subcarriers to achieve a bit-error-rate (BER) below the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) limit of 3.8 × 10^-3 as compared with a conventional CADD receiver. Despite the robustness to the time delay fluctuation decreases, which can be avoided using time-independent components in place of time delay line, more than a 3.2-dB optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) gain can be obtained regardless of CSPR.