Experimental demonstration of low-complexity fiber chromatic dispersion mitigation for reduced guard-interval OFDM coherent optical communication systems based on digital spectrum sub-band multiplexing

We experimentally demonstrate a novel digital signal processing (DSP) structure for reduced guard-interval (RGI) OFDM coherent optical systems. The proposed concept is based on digitally slicing optical channel bandwidth into multiple spectrally disjoint sub-bands which are then processed in parallel. Each low bandwidth sub-band has a smaller delay-spread compared to a full-band signal. This enables compensation of both chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion using a simple timing and one-tap-per-symbol frequency domain equalizer with a small cyclic prefix overhead. In terms of the DSP architecture, this allows for a highly efficient parallelization of DSP tasks performed over the received signal samples by deploying multiple processors running at a lower clock rate. It should be noted that this parallelization is performed in the frequency domain and it allows for flexible optical transceiver schemes. In addition, the resulting optical receiver is simplified due to the removal of the CD compensation equalizer compared to conventional RGI-OFDM systems. In this paper we experimentally demonstrate digital sub-banding of optical bandwidth. We test the system performance for different modulation formats (QPSK, 16QAM and 32QAM) over various transmission distances and optical launch powers using a 1.5% CP overhead in all scenarios. We also compare the proposed RGI-OFDM architecture performance against common single carrier modulation formats. At the same total data rate and signal bandwidth both systems have similar performance and transmission reach whereas the proposed method allows for a significant reduction of computational complexity due to removal of CD pre/post compensation equalizer.