POLMUX-OFDM-DD transmitter and receiver for reduced complexity and overhead in optical access/metro transmission

1. An optical communication system comprising:

a polarization multiplexed orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing POLMUX-OFDM transmitter for generating a POLMUX-OFDM double sideband signal;

an optical processing for processing the double sideband signal from the transmitter to generate a wavelength division multiplexed (WDM) POLMUX-OFDM single sideband signal;

an optical processing receiver coupled to the said optical processing path for receiving the single sideband POLMUX-OFDM signal processed by the said optical path; and

a computationally-efficient block-diagonal multiple-input multiple-output MIMO equalizer responsive to the receiver for enabling correct operation for a completely random incoming signal polarization state without adaptive polarization control at said receiver, which enables complexity and power consumption reduction;

wherein receiver side optical processing in the form of parallel polarization-orthogonal optical filters is used for removal of polarization-rotated optical carriers.

2. The system of claim 1 wherein said transmitter comprises separating two carriers with a differential phase shift key DPSK demodulator prior to said generating a POLMUX-OFDM double sideband signal.

3. The system of claim 1 wherein optical processing in the form of an optical filter is used for optical single sideband filtering of a WDM-POLMUX-OFDM signal.

4. The system of claim 1 , wherein said block-diagonal MIMO equalizer comprises a reduced overhead training signal recovery.

5. The system of claim 4 , wherein said block-diagonal MIMO equalizer comprises a channel estimation and classification responsive to said reduced overhead training signal recovery.

6. The system of claim 5 , wherein said block-diagonal MIMO equalizer comprises a diagonal non-MIMO function, responsive to said channel estimation and classification.

7. The system of claim 6 , wherein said block-diagonal MIMO equalizer comprises a diagonal zero forcing ZF responsive to said diagonal non-MIMO function.

8. The system of claim 5 , wherein said block-diagonal MIMO equalizer comprises a block diagonal 2×2 MIMO function, responsive to said channel estimation and classification.

9. The system of claim 8 , wherein said block-diagonal MIMO equalizer comprises a two symbol linear equalizer and a two symbol maximum likelihood ML responsive to said block-diagonal 2×2 MIMO function.

10. The system of claim 4 , wherein said channel classification as fully diagonal comprises use of a metric computation where there is denoted a 4×4 channel estimation matrix by H,

H

=

[

H

1

0

0

H

2

]

,

where 0 denotes a 2×2 all-zeros matrix and H 1 and H 2 are arbitrary 2×2 matrices, wherein if the receiver-side state of polarization (SOP) is such that the off-diagonal elements of H 1 and H 2 are sufficiently small, H will further simplify to a fully diagonal matrix, with a negligible effect on equalization performance.

11. The system of claim 4 , wherein said reduced overhead training signal recovery exploits a new training sequence configuration to enable a block diagonal channel estimation with reduced overhead, such that 50% fewer signaling intervals are used for training and can be used for data symbols instead, thereby increasing the transmission rate.

12. The system of claim 1 , wherein said block-diagonal MIMO equalizer comprises processing training sequences to extract a channel estimation matrix and classify it as either having a block-diagonal form or a full-diagonal form.

13. The system of claim 12 , wherein said classify comprises computing a metric from a channel estimation metric and comparing it with a threshold value where if a channel is classified as said block-diagonal then an OFDM data symbol pair S X,i and S Y,N−i+1 can be optimally processed independently of a second data sysmbol pair S Y,i and S X, N−i+1 and vice versa, where where the notation S X/Y,i denotes the OFDM symbol in polarization X/Y on OFDM subcarrier i, and the notation S X/Y,N−i+1 denotes the OFDM symbol in polarization X/Y on OFDM subcarrier N−i+1, where N denotes the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) size.

14. The system of claim 12 , wherein said classify comprises computing a metric from a channel estimation metric and comparing it with a threshold value where if a channel is classified as fully diagonal, all four data symbol pairs S X,i and S Y,N−i+1 , S Y,i and S X,N−i+1 can be equalized independently via a diagonal zero forcing ZF.