Digital Coherent Receiver Simulation and Experiment

A
Project Report
on
the Collaborative Grants
from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of Spain

Participante:
Bishal Neupane
(bishal.neupane@tsc.upc.edu)

Supervisores:
Prof. Jos A. Lzaro
(jose.lazaro@tsc.upc.edu)
Prof. Spadaro Salvatore
(spadaro@tsc.upc.edu)

Project Start Date: 15/11/2013

Project End Date: 30/06/2014
1

Contents
Abstract3
Introduction.4
Principle of Coherent Detection.5
Phase-Diversity Coherent Receivers7
Simulation of BPSK/QPSK Coherent Receivers.9
IQ Modulators Using two MZMs9
Phase Noise Estimation and Compensation Technique..14
Power-Law Phase Estimate.16
Experiment/Measurement of BPSK..19
Hilbert Transform CDR21
Conclusion..22
References..23
Appendix: Working Hours Report..24

Abstract
In this report a brief summary of the tasks executed during the course of the project is presented.
The project has been carried out to facilitate the implementation of real-time coherently detected
optical receiver for high-speed optical communication systems. In this project, simulation of
optical coherent receiver system using phase modulation in a noisy channel with the presence of
laser and local oscillator phase noise has been studied using MATLAB script. The report concerns
the collaborative grants from ministry of education, culture and sports of Spain.
The project is centered around developing Matlab script files for simulation of optical
communication system comprising optical transmitter using Mach-Zehnder Modulator and
successful decoding of the information carried on the phase and amplitude of the optical signals
at the receiver using hybrid optical coherent mixer. The results of the simulation are to be verified
using measurements from a real-time scenario in the laboratory.
In this project we try to simulate coherently detected optical communication system and then
observe the compatibility of the algorithms developed with that of real-time scenario. The goal
of the project was also to facilitate collaboration among professors and students to further
research activities.

Introduction
Recently there has been a renewed interest in coherent receivers in optical communications
society mainly because of the added advantages in terms of spectral efficiency, sensitivity to
various linear and non-linear dispersion and also the preservation of the state of polarization of
light signals in the electrical domain. Coherent receivers with phase and polarization diversity help
increase the spectral efficiency at higher bitrates by utilizing higher order modulation format like
n-PSK, QAM etc. Also, the implementation of equalization algorithms to alleviate various channel
impairments introduced in the optical link is becoming easier and robust as the complex signal
processing algorithms are becoming feasible due to increased processing power of modern DSPs.

Figure 1: Optical Coherent Receiver

As seen in figure 1, the coherent optical receiver mixes the incoming optical signal at the receiver
with a free running local laser called the local oscillator to extract all the properties of light signal
in the electrical domain. First, the two signals are mixed together and signal at intermediate
frequencies are produced at sum and difference of the incoming signal frequencies. Then, the inphase and in-quadrature signals are obtained using a balanced photo detectors which operate on
square-law principle. The setup in the figure corresponds to a phase diversity coherent receiver
where information about both the phase and amplitude of the received signal is preserved in the
digital domain for further signal processing to mitigate channel impairments unlike traditional
intensity based transmission systems where useful and rich properties of the light signal are lost
after detection by a photodetector.
Coherent receiver relies on the knowledge of the carrier phase since the local oscillator at the
receiver side acts as a total phase reference. Traditionally carrier synchronization was performed
either using an optical PLL or Electrical PLL using a hardware but the advancement in DSPs is
enabling polarization tracking and carrier synchronization to be done using a software [1].
4

Principle of Coherent Detection

The basic working principles of coherent detection are described in this section. There are at the
core two basic types of coherent detection mechanisms called Homodyne and Heterodyne. Using
either of these techniques we can fully recover the information on the optical complex field,
namely, the amplitude, the phase and the state of polarization (SOP) [2].
At the heart of the coherent detection lies beating of LO signal with that of the incoming signal at
the receiver to produce signals at intermediate frequencies. The optical signal sent from the
transmitter can be written as,
Es (t) A s (t) exp(js t)

where As (t) is the complex amplitude and s is the angular frequency. In the same way, the
electric field of the local oscillator at the receiver side can be expressed by,
ELO (t) A LO (t) exp(jLO t)

where ALO is the complex amplitude with constant value since it is not carrying any useful
information like As (t) coming from the transmitter and LO is the local oscillator (LO) angular
frequency. We can derive the powers of both information signal and LO signal using the complex
amplitudes as: Ps | As |2 /2 and PLO | ALO |2 /2 , respectively.

Figure 2: General Configuration of Coherent Receiver

Figure 3: Basic Configuration of a Coherent Receiver

In the setup above phase diversity technique is not used and is the simplest model. The
incorporation of the balanced photo detectors after the mixing of the signals helps to suppress
the DC component and increase the photocurrent. In the model shown above the mixing is
achieved by a 3-dB coupler that shifts either the signal field or the LO field by 180 degrees
between the output ports. Assuming the perfect matching between the states of polarizations
between signal and LO fields we can derive equations for electric fields incident on the
photodiodes and thus approximate the output photocurrent to decide which symbols were
transmitted [2].

Electric fields after 180 degree mixer are,

E1

1
(E s E LO )
2

E2

1
(E s E LO )
2

And respectively the output photocurrent can be derived as,

A (t) exp(js t) A LO (t) exp(jLO t)
I1 (t) R Re s

R
[Ps PLO 2 Ps PLO cos{IF t sig (t) LO (t)}]
2

A (t) exp(js t) A LO (t) exp(jLO t)

I 2 (t) R Re s

R
[Ps PLO 2 Ps PLO cos{IF t sig (t) LO (t)}]
2

Where, Re represents the real part of the signal and IF is the intermediate frequency such that

IF s LO , while sig (t) and LO (t) are the phases of the incoming and LO signals
respectively. Moreover, R is the responsitivity of the photodiodes such that,

R
Where,

is Plancks constant and e is the electron charge while is the quantum efficiency of

the photodiode. In the equations above for the photocurrents I1 (t) and I 2 (t) , the intermediate
frequency term corresponding to the sum of frequencies is ignored as they are usually filtered
out in some way due to the limited bandwidth of the photodiodes.
And finally the photocurrent output from the balanced detectors are given by,
I (t) I1 (t) I 2 (t) 2 R Ps (t) PLO cos{IF t sig (t) LO (t)}

In the equation above, the local oscillator power is usually kept constant and the phase term
accounts only for the noise that varies with time due to the finite linewidth of such lasers.

Phase-Diversity Coherent Receivers

The idea described above can be easily extended to include phase-diversity at the receiver, which
means use of higher order modulation that carries information both on the amplitude and phase
of the signal like QPSK, QAM etc. For this purpose a 90 degree optical hybrid mixer will be used
to extract the two in-phase and in-quadrature components of the information signal. Figure 3
shows the general configuration of a phase-diversity coherent receiver. Depending on the signal
frequency after the photodiodes, the configuration is categorized as being homodyne or
heterodyne. In homodyne setup, the intermediate frequency is 0 and thus the signal is baseband.
However, in heterodyne setup, the signal will be in some intermediate passband frequency and
then an electrical IQ-downconverter can be used to make the signal baseband. Homodyning
requires stringent requirements on the complexity of the receiver because the phase and
frequency of the LO laser has to be matched perfectly to that of the incoming signal but which is
often difficult to obtain in practice due to noise and instability present at the laser. The detailed
equations of the signals at various stages in the setup shown in figure 3 will be derived below [2].

Figure 3: Configuration of a Phase-Diversity Coherent Receiver

If we assume the homodyne setup and think of 90 degree optical hybrid as capable of giving 4
outputs E1 , E2 , E3 , and E4 from two inputs Es and ELO , the outputs can be described as,
E1

1
(E s E LO )
2

E2

1
(E s E LO )
2

E3

1
(E s j E LO )
2
7

E1

1
(E s j E LO )
2

Then the output photocurrents can be written as,

I I (t) I I 1 (t) I I 2 (t) R Ps PLO cos{ sig (t) LO (t)}
I Q (t) I Q1 (t) I Q 2 (t) R Ps PLO sin{ sig (t) LO (t)}

In the above in-phase and in-quadrature signals if we write sig (t) as a combination of a phasemodulated time-varying information part and a time-varying noise part such that:
sig (t) s (t) sn (t) . Here, s (t) refers to the information carrying phase term while sn (t) refers
to the additive phase noise term. If we substitute sig (t) s (t) sn (t) into the above equations
for I and Q terms, we get,
I I (t) R Ps PLO cos{ s (t) n (t)}
I Q (t) R Ps PLO sin{ s (t) n (t)}

where, n (t) sn (t) LO (t) is the total phase noise in the received signal. For an ideal reception
we have to be correctly able to estimate the noise term n (t) in order to make decisions on
symbols transmitted with sufficiently high certainty. We will explore some methods used during
the simulation in sections to follow.
In addition to the phase-diversity scheme mentioned above, a further degree of freedom can be
exploited to get higher spectral efficiency by using polarization multiplexing of light signals to
carry information on two polarizations orthogonal to each other so that the information on each
polarization can be transported safely without any interference. So, the coherent reception with
polarization-diversity will increase the spectral efficiency by a factor of 2. In order to incorporate
such a scheme in a coherent manner, a polarization beam splitter is used to split the incoming
light into two orthogonal polarizations and the 90 degree hybrids can be used to extract
information on two polarizations independently by mixing those signals with LO [3]. Polarization
can be tracked in the digital electrical domain and compensated for by using well-known adaptive
algorithms which are very efficient. Refer to the book on optical communications by Kazuro
Kikuchi [1] for detailed derivation of polarization and phase-diversity coherent receivers.

Simulation of BPSK/QPSK Coherent

Receivers
In this section some results obtained throughout the simulation of BPSK/QPSK coherent systems
is shown and the methods used behind those results are explained briefly. Figure 4 shows the
basic setup for simulation of BPSK/QPSK coherent system.

PRBS

CW laser

IQ
modulator

Noisy
Channel
90
degree
Hybrid

DSP

Figure 4: General Simulation setup

As shown in the figure 4, the transmitter side consists of a continuous wave (CW) laser with a
constant amplitude which will be used to carry information by the IQ modulator. The IQ
modulator in case of BPSK is just a Mach-Zehnder Modulator that modulates the pseudo-random
binary sequence (PRBS) on the phase of CW laser signal. BPSK is implemented by MZM such that
bit 1 corresponds to phase zero and bit 0 corresponds to phase change of pi.

IQ Modulators Using two MZMs

In this section, the principle behind MZM and how it can be used to modulate the CW light to
carry information in both phase and amplitude will be explained briefly.
Mach-Zehnder modulators are external modulation techniques. A standard MZM can be created
by combining two phase modulators based on electro-optic waveguides principle. Figure 5 shows
how an MZM is formed. In the figure, the upper and lower arms delay the signal passing through
it because of the quantum properties associated to the electrodes. Effectively, the driving
voltages applied to each arms changes the refractive index of the waveguide which causes delay
9

of lightwave carrier, which in turn means a phase shift. This phenomenon is also known as the
Pockels effect. As seen, MZMs are based on the principle of interference. The light signals on
those two arms interfere either constructively or destructively at the output port to provide
intensity modulation as well as phase modulation.

Electrodes

Output optical field

Input field

Waveguide

Figure 5: Mach-Zehnder Modulator consisting of two Phase Modulator Arms

The phase change on one of the arms caused by the driving voltage can be written as,

lower (t)

(V2 (t) Vbias )

V

Similarly, the phase change in the upper arm can be deduced and using the properties of couplers
the input and output signal fields can be observed. Moreover, if we use two of the above shown
MZMs (figure 5) to modulate IQ data. First, one of the MZMs will modulate the in-phase part
while the other MZM will be used to modulate the in-quadrature part and in-phase modulated
part will be combined with 90 degree shifted version of the in-quadrature modulated part to
obtain total IQ modulation. This is the setup used in the simulation, two MZMs, one added with
90 degree phase shifted version of the other. Refer to one of several references for the detailed
workings and derivation of MZMs and IQ modulators formed by two MZMs [4] [5] [6].

10

Here, we can see the result of BPSK phase modulation using two MZMs and the result of their
spectra. Initially, the random binary sequence is oversampled to be represented by many samples
corresponding to a given sampling frequency and the bandwidth of the system. While
oversampling the random bits, the resulting signal is also shaped to have a certain pulse pattern,
mainly non-return to zero or raised cosine. Now, the resulting sequence of data corresponds to
the electrical driving voltage as mentioned in figure 5. This driving voltage signal is used to
modulate a CW laser with constant amplitude to emulate phase changes of either zero degrees
for bit 1 or phase changes of pi for bit o. The BPSK modulation is achieved by biasing the DC
voltage at the minimum transmission point of the DC transfer function of MZM.
In the figure 6 below, we observe the signal characteristics in frequency domain. The picture on
the left shows the power distribution of a baseband signal concentrated around the center of the
frequency axis. However, in real communications scenario it is almost impossible to transmit the
data at such low frequencies, thus simulation of the signal at higher frequency also called carrier
frequency is performed. As seen, the carrier frequency was assumed to be 50 GHz in the
simulations while the symbol rate was fixed at 10 Gsymbols/seconds.

OUTPUT OF MZM, BASEBAND

PASSBAND OPTICAL SPECTRUM

0.01

Power [mW]

Power [mW]

0.015

0.005

0
-8

-6

-4

-2

0
2
Frequency [Hz]

0.01

0.005

0
-8

8
10

-6

-4

-100

-100

-200
-300

-6

-4

-2

0
2
Frequency [Hz]

0
2
Frequency [Hz]

8
10

x 10

PASSBAND OPTICAL SPECTRUM

Power [dB]

Power [dB]

OUTPUT OF MZM, BASEBAND

-400
-8

-2

x 10

-200
-300
-400
-8

8
10

x 10

-6

-4

-2

0
2
Frequency [Hz]

8
10

x 10

Figure 6: Spectrum of MZM modulated BPSK Signal Baseband and Pass band

One of the most reliable and fastest ways to observe the integrity of the signal at any point in the
transmission system is through eye-diagrams. The eye diagram shows the overlapping time
domain signals of fixed symbol duration in a single graph so the transition between different
symbols can be visualized and observed. It basically shows how well the different symbols can be
distinguished from each other. The best possible scenario would be the one shown on the left of
figure 7 as it represents the signal at the transmitter without any noise, thus has a very wide eyeopening. However, since the signal in the context is BPSK, all the information is carried on the inphase part. As a result, we can only observe the in-phase component eye-diagram and analyze
the signal quality. The graph on the right of figure 7 shows how an added noise reduces the eye11

opening and causes higher probability of bit errors due to ambiguity in deciding the bits correctly
as representing 1 or 0.
Eye Diagram at the TX after MZM: REAL

Noisy EYE-DIAGRAM: InPhase

-1

-1

-2

10

15

20

25

-2

30

Eye Diagram at the TX after MZM: IMAGINARY

-1

-1
0

10

15

20

25

15

20

25

30

25

30

Noisy EYE-DIAGRAM: InQuad

-2

10

-2

30

10

15

20

Figure 7: Eye Diagrams at the transmitter and its noise added version

Since the BPSK signal is completely defined by in-phase component we dont have any eyepattern on in-quadrature part. However, after an addition of complex noise we do see some effect
on eye-opening. Still, only the in-phase part is used for the decoding of a BPSK signal, so in
quadrature part acts like added noise.

In-Phase Low-Passed Sepectrum

0.2

0.15

0.15

Power [mW]

Power [mW]

IQ Sepectrum after Homodyning

0.2

0.1
0.05
0
-8

-6

-4

-2

0
2
Frequency [Hz]

0.1
0.05
0
-8

-6

-4

8
10

x 10

0
Power [dB]

Power [dB]

0
2
Frequency [Hz]

In-Phase Low-Passed Sepectrum

IQ Sepectrum after Homodyning

0

-50

-100

-150
-8

-2

10

x 10

-6

-4

-2

0
2
Frequency [Hz]

8
10

x 10

-50
-100
-150
-200
-8

-6

-4

-2

0
2
Frequency [Hz]

8
10

x 10

Figure 8: IQ spectrum after Homodyne Detection (left) and Low-passed In-Phase Component (right)

The result of optical 90 degree hybrid mixer in case of frequency matched local oscillator is shown
in figure 8. It is seen that after mixing of the incoming signal with that of the local oscillator we
get signals at intermediate frequency components given at sum and difference between two
12

frequencies. But, we are only interested at the part of the signal that is concentrated at the zero
frequency. As a result, the unwanted frequency components are filtered out and only the
frequency components of interest are extracted for further processing and decoding of the data.
After the detection of phase components of the signal using squared-law photo detector device,
they are converted into a digital form using an ADC and processed further for phase/frequency
and other channel impairment compensations.
Signals at TX and RX

Eye Diagram at the RX after LO: REAL

25

40

RX
TX

20

20

15

10

-20

-40

10

15

20

25

30

35

30

35

0
Eye Diagram at the RX after LO: IMAGINARY

-5

20

-10

10

-15

-20

-10

-25

-20

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

10

15

20

25

Figure 9: Received and sent time domain signals (left) and Eye-diagram after LO and low pass filter (right)

Due to finite linewidths of transmit and LO lasers the system introduces phase noise in addition
to the thermal and ASE noise. Both thermal and ASE noise can be approximated as Gaussian white
noise and can be considered together in simulations, as is done in [7].

13

Phase Estimated Signal Constellation

Constellation without Phase Estimate

90

90

120

120

60

60
6

3
2

150

150

30

180

180

210

210

330

240

30

300

330

240

270

300
270

Figure 10: Signal Constellation before (left) and after (right) phase estimation

Phase Noise Estimation and Compensation

Technique
The increase in the processing capacity of DSPs means many phase estimation techniques can be
studied and applied in real time synchronous optical coherent communication systems as
opposed to traditional phase-locked loops (PLLs). A number of phase estimation techniques can
be modeled and studied for correctly mitigating the unwanted phase noise accumulated in a
signal mainly due to finite linewidth of lasers.
First well look at the basic method called Feedforward Phase Estimation method to understand
the principle behind such techniques and further improvements to minimize errors due to cyclic
slips.

14

Arg (.)

(.)^4

Phase
Estimation

(.)/4

Figure 11: Schematic of Feedforward Phase Estimation for QPSK [8]

The method shown above in figure 11 is the basic phase estimation technique that works very
well for QPSK systems and which is also favored by many for its simple DSP implementation.
Basically, the principle behind such an algorithm lies around removing the data phase modulation
by raising the signal to the power of modulation order, i.e. 2 for BPSK, 4 for QPSK and so on. After
the power raising operation the resulting signal will have contained only the phase corresponding
to the noise. Then we effectively average or use some filtering operation to smooth up the phase
noise and subtract it from the sum of phase noise and data phase.
If we write the received signal as the sum of actual data signal and some noise terms, we get,

r(t) d (t) e j[ t s (t) (t)] p(t)

In the above equation, the received signal r(t) contains useful information phase s (t) and the
phase noise term (t) . Moreover, the whole signal is assumed to be affected by additional
complex Gaussian noise. This complex Gaussian noise can be thought of as the sum of all the
dominant noises like thermal noise and Amplifier Spontaneous Emission (ASE) noise which can be
affectively modeled as a Gaussian distribution.
If we write the previous equation in a digital form rather than time-domain form, we can proceed
with further study,

r(n) d (n) e j[ns ( n ) ( n )] p(n)

Where, (n) s (n) LO (n) corresponds to the difference between phase noises introduced by
the transmitter laser and the receiver local oscillator. And, s LO is the difference between
angular frequencies of the data signal and LO signal. Above, p (n) is a complex Gaussian noise
function which has a variance p 2 [7].
15

The phase noise is closely approximated by the Lorentzian linewidth formula assuming signal and
LO lasers have finite linewidth. As a result, the phase noise is a Wiener process (Gaussian random
walk function)

(n) (n 1) w(n)
Where, w(n) is a real Gaussian noise sequence having a variance w2 , and

w2 2 Ts v
v , is the combined linewidth typically in the range of 10e3 to 10e6 [9]. It is the full width at half
maximum of both lasers combined. And, Ts is the duration of a single symbol.
In our equation of the received sequence, it can be assumed that the angular frequency term is
constant because with very few simple DSP calculations it can be estimated correctly and it varies
much slowly compared to the actual phase noise [7] [8].

Power-Law Phase Estimate

Having formulated the distributions of noise terms in the previous section, lets take a close look
at the derivation of phase estimate step-by-step.
1) Remove data modulation from the received M-psk sequence by raising to the power of
modulation order M,
s(n) r(n) M
2) Extract the phase from s (n) ,

(n) argunwrapped [s(n)]

It is assumed that the phase noise is a wiener process which extends from negative infinity to
positive infinity, i.e. it is a random walk process as a result of cumulative nature of phase noise.
So, this steps extends the phase value returned by matlab from pi to +pi to
increments/decrements of 2*pi every time the phase crosses negative real axis.
3) Now, inherently, (n) M (n) q(n) , remember that q(n) corresponds to Gaussian noise
sequence with variance p 2 and (n) is what we wish to estimate from the observable
quantity (n) .
4) The transfer function that smooths out the phase noise by modeling it as a wiener process
is given by,

1 1
(z)
(z)
M 1 z 1
Where,

16

M 2 w 2 2 q 2 M w M 2 w2 4 q 2
2 q 2

And,

q 2 4 p 2 4 p 4 , for BPSK

q 2 16 p 2 144 p 4 384 p 6 192 p8 , for QPSK.

5) After, successfully estimating the phase noise, the removal operation is performed by
multiplying the received sequence by the negative exponential of phase noise.

r (n) r (n) exp( j (n) offset)

Now, using r (n) the decisions about the transmitted symbols can be made by evaluating
the phase boundaries. The phase offset term restores the signal constellation in its original
place in case it was rotated by some fixed amount.
There are variants of the method mentioned above depending on how to use the transfer
function and when. Also, further improvements can be made to the above mentioned algorithm
to make it more robust to the additive noise term. For detailed derivation of the transfer function
mentioned above and other variants of the algorithm the reader is referred to [7].
Below, OSNR vs BER characteristics is shown. The corresponding BER is evaluated on 10
Gsymbols/s BPSK data with 131072 number of symbols. BER is calculated in a simple fashion, i.e.
the number of bit errors divided by the total number of symbols transmitted through the system.

Figure 12: OSNR vs BER

After the simulation of BPSK optical coherent transmission, QPSK transmission was also studied.
Some of the main results are shown below. Previously the in-quadrature component did not have
much say in the symbol decision of BPSK signals but now the presence of information on both
17

Phase and Amplitude affects the eye-diagram of both in-phase and in-quadrature components as
seen in figure 9 below.

Eye Diagram at the TX after MZM: REAL

Eye Diagram at the RX after LO: REAL

10

-1

-5

-2

-10

10

15

20

25

30
10

-1

-5
-10

10

15

20

25

10

15

20

25

30

35

30

35

Eye Diagram at the RX after LO: IMAGINARY

Eye Diagram at the TX after MZM: IMAGINARY

2

-2

30

10

15

20

25

Figure 13: QPSK signal Eye-Diagrams at TX (left) and RX (right)

Moreover, the signal constellation becomes more sensitive noises as we move towards higher
order modulation format. This will require stringent constraints on powers of real and imaginary
components of the signal as well as other channel impairments and noises. The signal
constellation before and after the phase noise compensation are shown below in the figure 10.

Phase Estimated Signal Constellation

Constellation without Phase Estimate

90

90

1.5

120

2.5

120

60

60
2

1.5

150

150

30

30
1

0.5

0.5

180

180

210

210

330

240

330

240

300

300
270

270

Figure 14: QPSK signal constellation at RX before (left) and after (right) the phase error compensation

18

Experiment/Measurement of BPSK
Signal
Generator

Laser
Diode

3-dB
splitter

MZM
Modulator
90
degree
Hybrid

LO

Polarization
controller
Figure 15: General Measurement setup employed in the lab

The basic model of a real-time coherent optical communication system deployed in the lab is
depicted in Figure 2 above. The system comprises of an optical transmitter, an intermediate
channel, and finally a receiver. The transmitter is responsible for transmitting a continuous wave
light signal at 1550 nm which will be modulated by a Mach-Zehnder modulator before going
through the coherent mixer at the receiver.
The experiment was carried out on a signal with a frequency of 2 MHz having a NRZ/sinusoidal
pulse shape. The data sent from a signal generator to the MZM modulator was a known sequence
of 1s and 0s. The MZM is susceptible to the changes in polarization of the light signal, for this
reason a polarization controller was used just before the MZM to make sure the signal reaches
MZM in the best possible polarization state, with highest power. In the laboratory, the first
scenario was to experiment with homodyne setup. For emulating homodyne receiver, we used a
single laser diode source as both the transmitter and LO by splitting the signal 50-50 using a 3-dB
coupler. The BPSK modulated signal and the LO signal was fed to the COH24 single polarization
90 degree optical hybrid by Kylia. It is again very important to control the polarization of two
signals before feeding into the hybrid as the polarization miss-match will cause will degrade the
signal quality due to interference and low power.
The major concern during the measurements so far is the timing error and jitter caused by the
mixing of the signals in the 90 degree optical hybrid that causes the correct extraction of samples
19

DSP

representing each symbols extremely difficult without clock-recovery circuit. It has been observed
that without a proper timing-recovery mechanism, the symbol decisions are likely to be
erroneous. Thus, as a start simple Hilbert transform based clock-data recovery algorithm was
tested and found to work well when the observed measurements are not too stable and not too
noisy, i.e. is to say that the signal transitions from the zero level are separated enough without
random fluctuations between bits 0s and 1s, like the one shown in.

Eye-Diagram of the INPUT SIGNAL

Eye-Diagram of the INPHASE SIGNAL from Hybrid

1.5

0.08
0.06

0.04
0.02

0.5

0
0

-0.02
-0.04

-0.5

-0.06
-1

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

-0.08

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

Figure 16: The Eye-Diagrams of input signal (left) and in-phase signal after 90 degree hybrid (right)

The figure above shows the eye-diagrams of the input signal sequence and the in-phase signal at
the receiver after hybrid mixing. The figures shown above were smoothed out a little to reduce
unnecessary noise fluctuations. Moreover, it can be observed from the above diagram that the
system is not reliable because symbols do not have a perfect timing instance, they seem to be
moving side-ways making it difficult to observe exact symbol positions with a fixed amount of
duration. For an example the signal generated above corresponds to a frequency value, F =
2.2739176e6 Hz and oscillator sampling frequency, Fs = 500 Msamples/s, this setup of frequency
and sampling frequency means that we should have Fs/(2*F) = 109.94 number of samples per
symbol. Observe that the number of samples per symbols is already a floating point number which
introduces quantization errors when working with digital samples. Moreover, the biggest
problem is that this value is not constant during the period of whole sequence but rather
increasing or decreasing due to the shortcoming of proper clock-synchronization mechanism.
In addition, the image on the right of figure 16 corresponds to the in-phase component coming
out of the hybrid mixer, but if we look at the eye-diagram of the in-quadrature component in
figure 17, we observe that the signal is very noisy and unstable. One thing with BPSK is that inphase component sign is enough to decide the bits, however, in other applications of higher order
modulation format in-quadrature component also becomes critical in symbol decisions. And thus,
the system should be able to correctly sample the data at best possible instants of both the inphase and in-quadrature signals.
20

Eye-Diagram of the IN-Quadrature SIGNAL from Hybrid

0.08
0.06
0.04
0.02
0
-0.02
-0.04
-0.06
-0.08

50

100

150

200

250

300

350

Figure 17: In-quadrature component eye-diagram after the hybrid mixer

Hilbert Transform CDR

Input Signal Hilbert Transform
Hilbert
Input

1.5

0.5

-0.5

-1

-1.5
0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1600

1800

2000

Figure 18: The square input signal (Red) & its Hilbert transform (blue)

Basically, the principle of Hilbert transform clock-data recovery (CDR) lies in the fact that Hilbert
transform produces peaks at the transition points of a signal. Thus, if we can track all the peaks
of the Hilbert transform we can find the duration in-between and effectively sample data at
21

correct positions [10]. The Hilbert transform (blue curve) of the input signal (red curve) in figure
18 shows the usefulness of Hilbert transform to find peaks at the transition of a signal from one
level to the other. No matter whether the peak is a minimum or maximum, it is certain to contain
transition and we can use the gaps between these peaks to know how many symbols are likely to
be contained and where.

Conclusion
To conclude, the project can give a momentum towards further development of the digital
coherent receiver from a ground point of view. The simulation of a coherent system has been
done in Matlab with script files and known to give intuition as well as better working environment
for system evaluations. Moreover, there are further improvements required to be able to develop
a fully-fledged coherent receivers in practical optical communications scenario. From the
foundations established during the course of this project, it should be fairly straightforward to
proceed with more reliable and robust algorithms to tackle real-time communications difficulties
like timing-recovery, carrier phase & frequency compensation, channel equalization and linear
and non-linear transmission impairments associated with practical optical communication
systems at very high bit rates. Nevertheless, useful momentum has been gained for further work
in the area during the whole project.

22

References
[1] E. Ip, A. P. T. Lau, D. J. F. Barros and J. M. Kahn, "Coherent detection in optical fiber systems,"
Optical Society of America, 2008.
[2] K. Kikuchi, High Spectral Density Optical Communication Technologies, 2010.
[3] S. Tsukamoto, Y. Ishikawa and K. Kikuchi, "Optical Homodyne Receiver Comprising Phase and
Polarization Diversities with Digital Signal Processing," Research Center for Advanced Science and
Technology, University of Tokyo.
[4] R.-J. E. Peter J. Winzer, "Advanced Optical Modulation Formats," in Proceedings of the IEEE, 2006.
[5] M. Seimetz, "Multi-format Transmitters for Coherent Optical M-PSK and M-QAM Transmission,"
Berlin, Germany, 2005.
[6] K.-P. Ho and H.-W. Cuei, "Generation of Arbitrary Quadrature Signals Using One Dual-Drive
Modulator," JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, vol. 23, no. 2, 2005.
[7] M. G. Taylor, "Phase Estimation Methods for Optical Coherent Detection Using Digital Signal
Processing," JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, vol. 27, no. 7, 2009.
[8] L. N. Binh, Optical Fiber Communications Systems : Theory and Practice with MATLAB and Simulink
Models, CRC Press, 2010.
[9] G. P. Agrawal, Fiber-Optic Communications Systems, John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
[10] Y. Malinge, "Improving Clock-data Recovery Using Digital Signal Processing," Northeastern
University, 2008.

23

Appendix
Collaborative Grant Project Status
Student: Bishal Neupane ()

, Supervisor: Jose Antonio

(Y3218219G) Lazaro

Technical University of Catalonia,

UPC

WBS

Real-time Optical Coherent Receiver Simulations and

Measurements

Today's Date:

15/11/2013

Start Date:

15/11/2013

End Date:

30/06/2014

Tasks

Start
15/11/201
3
15/11/201
3
18/11/201
3
25/11/201
3

Preliminary Reading

1.1

Optical Transmitters

1.2

Mach-Zehnder Modulators

1.3

Optical Coherent Receivers

1.4

Phase Noise in Optical

Transmission Systems

1.5

Real-time Systems Challenges

MATLAB Introduction

30/11/201
3
09/12/201
3
28/01/201
4

2.1

MATLAB/Simulink Review for

Optical communications

28/01/201
4

2.2

Implementation of Basic functions

Start Simulation: BPSK

3.1

Mach-Zehnder Modulators

3.2

Noise and Filtering effects

3.3

Optical Hybrid mixer

15/02/201
4
23/01/201
4
23/01/201
4
03/02/201
4
08/02/201
4

Symbol Decisions/Phase noise

16/02/201
4

3.4

24

(vertical red line)

End

Hours Spent

Project Title:

Jose Antonio Lazaro

Duration (Days)

Project Lead:

14/12/2013
24/11/2013

20,25

24/11/2013

13,50

05/12/2013

10

22,50

07/12/2013

15,75

14/12/2013

11,25

12/02/2014

15

33,75

21/02/2014

13,50

02/02/2014

10

22,50

07/02/2014

9,00

15/02/2014

15,75

21/02/2014

11,25

21/02/2014

26/02/2014

3.4

Homodyne/Heterodyne
Simulation Variants

Start Simulation: QPSK

17/02/201
4
27/02/201
4

4.1

Bit Mapping and QPSK

Modulation using Dual-MZMs

27/02/201
4

4.2

Passband Representation and

representing complex signal by
real signal

26/02/2014

20,25

04/03/2014

11,25

05/03/201
4

08/03/2014

6,75

4.3

Homodyne/Heterodyne
Simulation

09/03/201
4

24/03/2014

15

33,75

4.4

Eye Diagrams/Simple BER

Evaluations

23/03/201
4

01/04/2014

20,25

4.5

Phase Noise Mitigation

Techniques

12/04/2014

10

22,50

Phase Estimation/BER Estimation

02/04/201
4
13/04/201
4

5.1

Viterbi&Viterbi + KIKUCHI variant

25/04/2014

12

27,00

5.2

Feedforward NDA Average

10/05/2014

13

29,25

Measurements and Testing

13/04/201
4
27/04/201
4
11/05/201
4

6.1

Laboratory Measurement Setup

and tests

12/05/201
4

28/05/2014

16

36,00

6.2

BPSK Measurement and Data

Retrieval

09/06/2014

18,00

6.2

Post Processing on MATLAB

01/06/201
4
10/06/201
4

27/06/2014

17

38,25

6.2

Writing Report and Evaluations

23/06/201
4

12/04/2014

10/05/2014

30/06/2014

30/06/2014

Total Hours =

15,75

468,00

REFERENCES
Fiber based Mach-Zehnder interferometric structures: principles and required characteristics for efficient modulation format conversion, G. Ducournau*, O. Latry and M. Ktata
Fiber Optic Communication Systems, 3rd Edition, Govind. P. Agrawal
Optical Fiber Communications Systems: Theory and Practice with MATLAB and SIMULINK Models, Le Nguyen Binh
Digital Communications, McGraw-Hill, 4th ed., 2000, John G. Proakis
Algorithms for Coherent Detection, Michael G. Taylor
Digital coherent transceiver for optical communications from design to implementation, Master Thesis UPC, Esdras Anzuola Valencia, 2012
Frequency Estimation in Intradyne Reception, Andreas Leven, Senior Member, IEEE, Noriaki Kaneda, Member, IEEE, Ut-Va Koc, Member, IEEE,
Generation of Arbitrary Quadrature Signals Using One Dual-Drive Modulator, Keang-Po Ho, Senior Member, IEEE, and Han-Wei Cuei
Multi-format Transmitters for Coherent Optical M-PSK and M-QAM Transmission, Matthias Seimetz Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut
Optical Phase-Shift-Keyed Transmission, A. H. Gnauck, Senior Member, IEEE, Fellow, OSA, and P. J. Winzer, Member, IEEE, Member, OSA
Spectrum of Externally Modulated Optical Signals, Keang-Po Ho, Senior Member, IEEE, and Joseph M. Kahn, Fellow, IEEE
Effect of MachZehnder Modulator DC Extinction Ratio on Residual Chirp-Induced Dispersion in 10-Gb/s Binary and AM-PSK Duobinary Lightw ave Systems, Paolo Zandano, Marco Pirola at el.
Optical Homodyne Receiver Comprising Phase and Polarization Diversities w ith Digital Signal Processing, Satoshi Tsukamoto, Yuta Ishikawa, and Kazuro Kikuchi
Advanced Optical Modulation Formats, By Peter J. Winzer, Senior Member IEEE, and Rene-Jean Essiambre, Member IEEE
Coherent detection in optical fiber systems, Ezra Ip*, Alan Pak Tao Lau, Daniel J. F. Barros, Joseph M. Kahn
Simple Measurement of Eye Diagram and BER Using High-Speed Asynchronous Sampling, Ippei Shake, Member, IEEE, Hidehiko Takara, Member, IEEE, and Satoki Kawanishi, Member, IEEE, Member, OSA
Estimation of Phase Noise for QPSK Modulation over AWGN Channels, Florent Munier, Eric Alpman,
A SIMULATION STUDY OF THE VITERBI AND VITERBI CARRIER PHASE ESTIMATION ALGORITHM, R.A. Harris and JI. Yarmood
Phase Estimation Methods for Optical Coherent Detection Using Digital Signal Processing, Michael G. Taylor, Member, IEEE
A BPSK/QPSK Timing-Error Detector for Sampled Receivers, Floyd M. Gardner, Fellow, IEEE
Improving clock-data recovery using digital signal processing, Yann Malinge, Northeastern University
Coherent optical communication systems, Kazuro Kikuchi

25