Investigation of the low-complexity Hilbert FIR filter enhanced 112-Gbit/s SSB 16-QAM transmission with parallelized Kramers-Kronig reception over 1440-km SSMF

The Hilbert transform links the log-magnitude and the phase of the field modulated signals as long as the minimum phase condition is satisfied in the Kramer-Kronig (KK) receiver. In discrete-time signal processing, the Hilbert transform is generally replaced by a finite impulse response (FIR) filter to reduce the computational complexity, that is the so-called Hilbert transform FIR (HT-FIR) filter. The performance of the HT-FIR filter is extremely important, as the in-band flatness, the ripple, the group delay, the Gibbs phenomenon, and the edge effect, which indeed impair the phase retrieval. Hence, we investigate four different HT-FIR filter schemes that are in the form of type III and type IV based on the frequency-domain (FD) sampling approach and the time-domain (TD) windowing function approach. Also, we analyze the performance for each filter under different digital upsampling scenarios and conclude that a trade-off between the reduced inter-symbol-interference (ISI) and the Gibbs phenomenon is essential to obtain an optimal sampling rate and an improved KK performance when the HT-FIR filter with a short length is adopted. The results show that the FD-based HT-FIR filter can relax the upsampling requirement while having a better in-band flatness and a lower edge effect. The experiment is conducted in the parallelized block-wise KK reception-based 112-Gbit/s SSB 16-QAM optical transmission system over a 1920-km cascaded Raman fiber amplifier (RFA) link to investigate the limit transmission performance of the practical KK receiver. The experimental results show that when the transmission distance is up to 1440-km, the BER of the FD-based HT-FIR filter can be lower than the soft decision-forward error correction (SD-FEC) threshold of 2 × 10 -2 with only 3 samples per symbol (3-SPS) upsampling rate and 8 non-integer tap coefficients are used, while other TD-based HT-FIR filter schemes with a BER lower than the SD-FEC threshold require at least 4-SPS upsampling rate.