IQ Skew and Imbalance Estimation for Coherent Point-to-Multi-Point Optical Networks

Coherent point-to-multi-point (PtMP) optical network based on digital subcarrier multiplexing (DSCM) has been a promising technology for metro and access networks to achieve cost savings, low latency, and high flexibility. In-phase and quadrature (IQ) impairments of the coherent transceiver (e.g. IQ skew and power imbalance) cause severe performance degradation. In the DSCM-based coherent PtMP optical networks, it is hard to realize far-end IQ-impairments estimation for the hub transmitter because the leaf on one subcarrier cannot acquire the signal on the symmetrical subcarrier. In this paper, we propose a far-end IQ-impairments estimation based on the specially designed time-and-frequency interleaving tones (TFITs), which can simultaneously estimate IQ skews and power imbalances of the hub transmitter and leaf receiver at an individual leaf. The feasibility of the TFITs-based IQ-impairments estimation has been experimentally verified by setting up 8Gbaud/SC×4SCs DSCM-based coherent PtMP optical network. The experimental results depict that the absolute errors in the estimated IQ skew and power imbalance are within ± 0.5ps and ± 0.2dB, respectively. In conclusion, TFITs-based IQ-impairments estimation has great potential for DSCM-based coherent PtMP optical networks.