Post-FEC performance evaluation of coherent QPSK system with an enhanced pilot-aided CPE scheme

In this paper, a simple and robust pilot-aided carrier phase estimation scheme with a modified phase unwrapping is proposed. The principle of the proposed phase unwrapping is shown with a step-by-step procedure. Further, we test the post-FEC BER performance for the pilot-aided carrier phase estimation scheme with the traditional and proposed phase unwrapping. For the proposed phase unwrapping, a cycle slip rate reduction of about 10 times is achieved than the case using the traditional phase unwrapping through simulations in the presence of Wiener phase noise. Finally, we present a 2.2 Eb/N0 gain and post-FEC error-free performance with only 0.78 % pilot overhead in a 32-Gbaud QPSK system using soft-decision forward error correction.