Carrier Phase Estimation in Multi-Subcarrier Coherent Optical Systems

In this letter, we analyze three different carrier phase estimation approaches for coherent optical systems based on multi-subcarrier modulation, comparing them in terms of both performance and complexity. Averaging the estimated values on the subcarriers (SCs) significantly increases the laser linewidth tolerance at the expense of additional complexity, while using a single SC for carrier phase estimation yields a complexity reduction without any substantial performance loss with respect to performing a separate phase estimation on all SCs.