Zero-guard-interval coherent optical OFDM with overlapped frequency-domain CD and PMD equalization

This paper presents a new channel estimation/equalization algorithm for coherent OFDM (CO-OFDM) digital receivers, which enables the elimination of the cyclic prefix (CP) for OFDM transmission. We term this new system as the zero-guard-interval (ZGI)-CO-OFDM. ZGI-CO-OFDM employs an overlapped frequency-domain equalizer (OFDE) to compensate both chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD) before the OFDM demodulation. Despite the zero CP overhead, ZGI-CO-OFDM demonstrates a superior PMD tolerance than the previous reduced-GI (RGI)-CO-OFDM, which is verified under several different PMD conditions. Additionally, ZGI-CO-OFDM can improve the channel estimation accuracy under high PMD conditions by using a larger intra-symbol frequency-averaging (ISFA) length as compared to RGI-CO-OFDM. ZGI-CO-OFDM also enables the use of ever smaller fast Fourier transform (FFT) sizes (i.e. <128), while maintaining the zero CP overhead. Finally, we provide an analytical comparison of the computation complexity between the conventional, RGI- and ZGI- CO-OFDM. We show that ZGI-CO-OFDM requires reasonably small additional computation effort (~13.6%) compared to RGI-CO-OFDM for 112-Gb/s transmission over a 1600-km dispersion-uncompensated optical link.