Laser phase noise impact on optical DP-MQAM: experimental investigation

Advances in optical technologies, modulation formats, and symbol transmission rates became paramount for today’s agile high spectral efficiency optical networks. Nonetheless, laser phase noise (PN) has played a major impact on the performance of these systems due to the employment of moderate-quality lasers that significantly affect the implementation of high-order modulation schemes starting from existing QPSK and growing to MQAM, $$M=16$$M=16, 32, and 64. In this paper, we report an optical dual-polarization (DP) transmitter prototype that digitally emulates the effect of the laser phase noise, according to Wiener process, applied to a different types narrow-linewidth laser sources. This enables the generation of an arbitrary laser linewidth ranging from kilohertz up to tens of megahertz. Our experimental study evaluates the effect of PN on the performance of tracking algorithms commonly implemented on practical coherent receivers. The experimental results show that, for laser linewidth $$\le $$≤1 MHz, practical filter recovery algorithm succeeds to make appropriate tracking for both DP-QPSK and 16 QAM at 16- and 32-Gbaud system rates. However, for 10 MHz linewidth, correct recovery is possible only for DP-QPSK.