We exploit pilot-aided (PA) transmission enabled by single-sideband (SSB) subcarrier modulation of both quadrature signals in the DSP domain to achieve fully feedforward carrier recovery (FFCR) in single-carrier (SC) coherent systems with arbitrary M-QAM constellations. A thorough mathematical description of the proposed PA-FFCR is presented, its linewidth tolerance is assessed by simulations and compared to other FFCR schemes in literature. Also, implementation and complexity issues of PA-FFCR are presented and briefly compared with other CR schemes. Simulation results show that PA-FFCR performs close to the best known CR technique in the literature with less computation complexity. Quantitatively, for 1 dB optical-signal-to-noise-ratio (OSNR) penalty at BER = 3.8 × 10(-3), PA-FFCR tolerates linewidth-symbol-duration products (Δf.Ts) of 1.5 × 10(-4) (4-QAM), 4 × 10(-5) (16-QAM) and 1 × 10(-5) (64-QAM). Finally, we propose the use of maximum likelihood (ML) phase estimation next to pilot phase compensation. This significantly improves tolerable Δf.Ts values to 7.5 × 10(-4) (4-QAM), 1.8 × 10(-4) (16-QAM) and 3.5 × 10(-5) (64-QAM). It turns out that PA-FFCR with ML always performs better or at least the same compared to other CR techniques known in literature with lower complexity in addition to the fact that pilot information can be as well exploited for tasks other than CR e.g., fiber nonlinearity compensation, with no extra complexity.
© 2011 Optical Society of America