Blind frequency offset estimation using the optimal decision threshold-assisted QPSK-partition method for probabilistically shaped MQAM systems

Abstract

Moderate or strong shaping conditions reduce the occurrence probability of the outermost ring constellation points of probabilistically shaped (PS)-M quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals, which easily causes the peaks in the 4th power periodogram of received signals be submerged, accordingly the classical frequency offset estimation (FOE) scheme using 4th power fast Fourier transform (FFT) cannot be applied in PS-MQAM system. To solve this issue, we have proposed an optimal decision threshold assisted quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK)-partition blind FOE scheme. Firstly, the proposed scheme utilizes an optimal decision threshold assisted method for the symbol decision of received symbols, then chooses the symbols on multiple specific QPSK-shape rings. Secondly, the amplitude of each symbol selected above is normalized and uniformly augmented to 18 . Finally, it carries out FOE using an improved time-domain 4th power feedforward method that eliminates the time interval. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme has been verified by 28 GBaud polarization division multiplexing (PDM) PS-16/64QAM simulations and 28/8 GBaud PS-16/64QAM experiments. The results obtained by this scheme present that under moderate or strong shaping conditions, the generalized mutual information (GMI) increases with optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) and eventually exceeds the corresponding GMI threshold. Besides that, the FOE range can reach [-Rs/8, Rs/8], where Rs denotes the baud rate. When OSNRs are higher than 16 dB and 19.5 dB, the NMSEs of PS-16QAM-3/3.6 are lower than 1e-7, respectively. For PS-64QAM-4.4/5, the NMSEs achieve lower than 1e-6 after OSNR increases to 20.3 dB and 23.4 dB, respectively. More importantly, the overall complexity can be reduced to O(N), which is at most as 26.5% as that of FFT FOE scheme.