Laser Phase Noise Effects and Joint Carrier Phase Recovery in Coherent Optical Transmissions With Digital Subcarrier Multiplexing

In this paper, we numerically and experimentally investigate the impairments related to laser phase noise in coherent digital subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) systems. Based on the evaluation in both back-to-back and transmission scenarios and the performance comparison between single carrier (SC) and SCM systems, we show that even though SCM systems suffer from degraded performance of carrier phase recovery (CPR) algorithms, they can potentially achieve an improved laser linewidth tolerance compared with SC systems after long-haul transmission attributed to the mitigation of equalization-enhanced phase noise. In addition, the effect of dispersion-enhanced phase noise is discussed in digital SCM systems, and a joint CPR (J-CPR) algorithm is proposed for cycle slip detection and correction. The effectiveness of the proposed J-CPR algorithm is then demonstrated in a 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) digital SCM system by both simulations and experiments.