Achievable Mitigation of Nonlinear Phase Noise through Optimized Blind Carrier Phase Recovery

Partial mitigation of nonlinear phase noise by standard carrier phase recovery has been reported both, experimentally and through simulations. In this paper we quantify the achievable mitigation by using different implementations of the carrier phase recovery. All the approaches are based on the widespread blind phase search algorithm but follow different optimization strategies for handling simultaneously both, linear and nonlinear impairments of the channel. We apply the algorithms on probabilistically shaped signals transmitted over standard single mode fiber and non-zero dispersion shifted fiber in order to consider conditions in which the system performance is evidently affected by nonlinear phase noise. The results obtained are finally compared to the statistically estimated achievable phase noise removal. This allows to evaluate in different system scenarios an upper bound to the potential gain obtainable by algorithms developed to mitigate the detrimental impact of short-correlated nonlinear phase noise.