Transmitter IQ mismatch compensation in coherent optical OFDM systems using pilot signals

Transmitter in-phase/quadrature (IQ) mismatch in coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) systems is difficult to mitigate at the receiver using conventional time domain methods such as the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure, particularly in the presence of channel distortion. In this paper, we present a scheme that mitigates both transmitter IQ mismatch and channel distortion. We propose a pilot structure to estimate both channel and IQ mismatch, and develop a minimum mean square error compensation method. Numerical results show that the proposed method is effective in reducing transmitter IQ mismatch for a CO-OFDM system.