Analytical approach for performance evaluation of QPSK system with optical coherent receiver and digital signal processing

The Bit-Error-Ratio (BER) floor caused by the laser phase noise in the optical fibre communication system with quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) and coherent detection followed by digital signal processing (DSP) is analytically evaluated. An in-phase and quadrature (I&Q) receiver with a carrier phase recovery using DSP is considered. The carrier phase recovery is based on a phase estimation of a finite sum (block) of the signal samples raised to the power of four and the phase unwrapping at transitions between blocks. It is demonstrated that errors generated at block transitions cause the dominating contribution to the system BER (floor) when the impact of the additive noise is negligibly small in comparison with the effect of the laser phase noise. Even the BER floor in the case when the phase unwrapping is omitted is analytically derived and applied to emphasize the crucial importance of this signal processing operation. The analytical results are verified by full Monte Carlo simulations. Based on the achieved analytical results the laser linewidth tolerance of the system is calculated.