Pilot-Symbols-Aided Carrier-Phase Recovery for 100-G PM-QPSK Digital Coherent Receivers

A feedforward pilot-symbols-aided carrier-phase recovery scheme is described. The approach relies on pilot symbols that are time-division multiplexed with the transmitted data. In the scheme, an initial coarse estimation of the optical carrier phase, exploiting the knowledge of pilot symbols, is followed by a fine nondata-aided, or blind, estimation. The main advantage of the proposed solution is that of avoiding the phase- ambiguity problem after a cycle slip. The overhead and the impact on the performance of pilot symbols are investigated for long-haul transmission of 100-Gb/s polarization-multiplexed quadrature phase-shift keying wavelength-division-multiplexing signals in different scenarios. For homogeneous transmission, the proposed scheme outperforms blind carrier recovery with differential decoding.