Laser linewidth tolerance for nonlinear frequency division multiplexing transmission with discrete spectrum modulation.

Although fruitful investigations of carrier phase estimation (CPE) have been conducted for a traditional coherent fiber optical transmission, there are few studies on the CPE for a nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT) based transmission. A laser linewidth induced phase noise leads to a phase rotation of the nonlinear spectra and the scattering data, which is similar to its effect on the linear spectra. Here, we first identify that both feed forward the M-th power, and the blind phase search (BPS)-based CPE can function well in the nonlinear frequency division multiplexing (NFDM) transmission with discrete spectrum modulation. Then, a performance comparison between two CPE schemes is presented for various modulation formats under the scenario of a single eigenvalue NFDM transmission. Our simulation results indicate that the laser linewidth tolerances of 2 GBaud quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), 8-phase shift keying (8-PSK), and 16-amplitude phase shift keying (16-APSK) are 2.3 MHz, 1.05 MHz, and 250 KHz, respectively, given a 1-dB optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) penalty at BER = 10. Finally, the BPS algorithm is experimentally verified under the same scenario of a 2 GBaud back-to-back transmission, due to the use of a semiconductor laser with a 100 KHz linewidth.