Spectrally efficient optical transmission based on Stokes vector direct detection.

We propose a novel detection scheme called Stokes vector direct detection (SV-DD) to realize high electrical spectral efficiency and cost-effective optical communication for short and medium reach. With SV-DD, the signal is modulated in only one polarization and combined with the carrier in the orthogonal polarization for fiber transmission. At reception, the combined signal is detected in Stokes space by three or four photo-detectors. Compared with conventional DD technique, SV-DD is resilient to both chromatic dispersion and signal-to-signal beat noise. Furthermore, SV-DD does not require polarization tracking or narrow band optical filtering for carrier extraction. In this paper, we present for the first time the numerical analysis and experimental demonstration of single-carrier SV-DD. We report 62.5-Gb/s data rate single-carrier SV-DD transmission over 160-km SSMF using 12.5-Gbaud 32-QAM modulation.