Hardware-Efficient Phase Estimation for Digital Coherent Transmission With Star Constellation QAM

In order to build optical transmission systems for 100 Gb/s and above on a single wavelength division multiplexing channel, transition from quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) to higher quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) formats seems to be inevitable. Instead of the usual square constellation QAM, we focus on regular star constellation QAM formats and present a hardware-efficient phase-estimation algorithm that is suitable for all regular star constellations, together with preliminary simulation results.