Enhanced performance of phase-conjugated OFDM subcarriers using digital coherent superposition

We have recently demonstrated the improved phase noise tolerance in coherent optical OFDM by digital coherent superposition of optical OFDM subcarriers, which are phase-conjugated pairs with Hermitian symmetry. In this approach, we realized DCS of OFDM subcarriers in single polarization (or channel), denoted as SP-DCS-OFDM. In this paper, we show that another approach is in dual polarizations, or DP-DCS-OFDM. According to the concept of phase-conjugated twin wave, both approaches can also mitigate the fiber nonlinearity to the first order. We prove that both approaches can cancel the inter-carrier interference (ICI) due to phase noise to the second order, and we derive the reduced ICI power to the fourth order using the Wiener phase noise model. In simulation, we show the enhanced tolerance to the laser phase noise and fiber nonlinearity.