Phase Noise Effects on Phase-Modulated Coherent Optical OFDM

One of the primary drawbacks of orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is the large peak-to-average ratio (PAPR). It continues to contribute nonlinear degradations after it was introduced into optical fiber transmissions. However, phase-modulated OFDM can reduce the PAPR to the minimum, since its amplitude can be constant. In this paper, we conduct the theoretical and experimental study on the laser phase noise effect in phase-modulated coherent optical OFDM systems. Due to the laser phase noise, the phase transformation at the receiver is prone to errors due to phase wrapping. Consequently, we propose a mean-phase-compensation (MPC) method, which compensate for the mean phase offset for each OFDM symbol that has a Gaussian-distributed histogram. This method can avoid the problematic unwrapping function in phase transformation. We derive the closed-form expressions for the phase noise spreading and the corresponding signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) based on the Wiener phase noise model. Unlike conventional coherent optical OFDM, the phase noise spreading to each OFDM subcarrier is decided by the reciprocal of the square of the subcarrier frequency, and the SNR can be improved by using a stronger PM modulation. We also discuss the SNR improvement by discarding a few affected subcarriers closing to dc. In a simulation, we demonstrate that our closed-form expressions are accurate. Finally, we experimentally verify our MPC method and our analysis.