Fast dispersion estimation in coherent optical 16QAM fast OFDM systems

Fast channel estimation is crucial to increase the payload efficiency which is of particular importance for optical packet networks. In this paper, we propose a novel least-square based dispersion estimation method in coherent optical fast OFDM (F-OFDM) systems. Additionally, we experimentally demonstrate for the first time a 37.5 Gb/s 16QAM coherent F-OFDM system with 480 km transmission using the proposed scheme. The results show that this method outperforms the conventional channel estimation methods in minimizing the overhead load. A single training symbol can achieve near-optimum channel estimation without any prior information of the transmission distance. This makes optical F-OFDM a very promising scheme for the future burst-mode applications.