Joint timing and frequency synchronization in coherent optical OFDM systems

Abstract

In this paper, we review our joint timing and frequency synchronization algorithms in coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) systems. We first present a timing estimation method by designing the pattern of the training symbol, whose timing metric has a sharp and clear peak, to ensure accurate timing offset (TO) estimation performance. Then we provide both data-aided (DA) and blind (BL) approaches to estimate the carrier frequency offset (CFO). For the DA algorithm, we utilize the same training symbol structure as the timing estimation does, while for the BL algorithm, we utilize the zero-subcarrier power (ZSP) to achieve full-range CFO estimation. Note that our joint timing and frequency synchronization approaches require only one OFDM symbol, which ensure not only the data transmission efficiency, but also the TO and CFO estimation performance. A modified BL ZSP algorithm is proposed to further improve the CFO estimation performance by taking the power average over a series of OFDM symbols. The effectiveness of the TO estimation algorithm, and both the DA and BL CFO estimation algorithms are verified and demonstrated in both simulations and experiments.

Keywords

timing offset (TO) / carrier frequency offset (CFO) / coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) / zero-subcarrier power (ZSP)

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the supports of Grants 61501313, 61571316 and 61302112 from NSFC and Grant 1-ZE5K from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

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