Chromatic Dispersion Estimation in Digital Coherent Receivers

Polarization-diverse coherent demodulation allows to compensate large values of accumulated linear distortion by digital signal processing. In particular, in uncompensated links without optical dispersion compensation, the parameter of the residual chromatic dispersion (CD) is vital to set the according digital filtering function. We present different non-data-aided (blind) CD estimation methods for single-carrier transmission under implementation constraint conditions such as bandwidth limitation and sampling rate. The estimation performance for various modulation formats is compared with respect to precision and robustness for a wide range of combined channel impairments.