Spectrum-Efficient Coherent Optical OFDM for Transport Networks

Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a promising technology for the next-generation optical transmission systems beyond 100 Gb/s. To further improve the spectral efficiency and system reliability, we propose a flexible coherent zero padding OFDM (CO-ZP-OFDM) scheme with signaling-embedded preamble and polarization-time-frequency (PTF) coded pilots for high-speed optical transport networks. Our judicious design embeds signaling in the specially designed preamble whose Delta-like correlation function helps to simultaneously achieve very accurate timing and frequency synchronization. Unlike the periodically inserted training symbols, the PTF-coded pilots are properly distributed within the time-frequency grid of the ZP-OFDM payload symbols and used to realize low-complexity multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel estimation at high accuracy. Compared with the conventional optical OFDM systems, CO-ZP-OFDM increases payload by about 6.68%, and the low-density parity-check (LDPC) coded bit error rate only suffers from no more than 0.3 dB compared with the back-to-back case even when the channel dispersion impairments are severe.