Joint monitoring of OSNR and frequency offset for coherent optical fiber communication systems based on QPSK training sequence

We propose a joint monitoring scheme of optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) and frequency offset (FO) based on the analysis of a quadrature phase-shift keying training sequence (QPSK-TS) spectrum for coherent optical fiber communication systems. In the proposed scheme, the FO estimation (FOE) consists of a coarse FOE stage and a fine FOE stage. Firstly, the coarse FOE stage is operated by searching for the peak of QPSK-TS spectrum. Then, after conducting coarse FO compensation (FOC) and down-sampling process to the QPSK-TS signal, the fine FOE stage can be realized by operating fast Fourier transform (FFT) to the 4th power of the signal. Compared with the traditional FOE scheme based on FFT with 4th-power operation, the FOE range of the proposed scheme can be extended to 3 times without losing the FOE resolution. After the FOC procedure with the proposed FOE scheme, OSNR can be monitored accurately by obtaining the whole in-band amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise from QPSK-TS spectrum. It is noteworthy that both the proposed FOE scheme and the OSNR monitoring scheme are insensitive to chromatic dispersion (CD) and intra-channel nonlinearity (NL). Simulation results for a 28 GBaud system with 2400 km transmission length show that when the OSNR range is 10∼28 dB and FO is 10.25 GHz, the mean OSNR estimated error is < 0.9 dB and the standard deviation is < 0.3 dB. Furthermore, the back-to-back (B2B) experiment results with 20 GBaud show that when the OSNR range is 10∼26 dB and FO is 7 GHz, the mean OSNR estimated error is < 0.8 dB and the standard deviation is also < 0.3 dB.