A Simple Blind Sampling Frequency Offset Estimation Scheme for Short-Reach DD-OFDM Systems

In this paper, a simple and overhead-free sampling frequency offset (SFO) blind estimation and compensation scheme is proposed and experimentally demonstrated in a short-reach direct detection orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DD-OFDM) transmission system. After extracting subcarriers of OFDM symbols from multiple OFDM frames, the phase shift is obtained by the fourth-power algorithm, and the obtained results are averaged to perform phase estimation. It can achieve high-precision SFO estimation while ensuring low computational complexity as well as high spectral efficiency. The experimental results show that the SFO estimation accuracy using the proposed scheme can be significantly reduced to as low as ±3 ppm when SFO ranges from -1000 ppm to +1000 ppm after 20-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission. Moreover, for the QPSK/16QAM encoded DD-OFDM systems aided by the proposed scheme, up to ±200 ppm SFO can be compensated with slight error vector magnitude (EVM) penalties after 20-km SSMF transmission. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that despite the existence of severe SFO, our proposed SFO compensation scheme can offer nearly negligible power penalties in the DD-OFDM system with optical back-to-back (OBTB) and 20-km SSMF transmission as compared to the ideal case without SFO.