Enhanced Blind Equalization for Optical DP-QAM in Finite Precision Hardware

In this letter, we apply the inverse QR decomposition-constant modulus algorithm (IQRD-CMA), blind equalization technique, for impaired 14 GBd DP-16 quadratic-amplitude modulation optical modulated signal. The IQRD-CMA is considered here to mitigate the effect of residual chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD). We evaluate the performance of the proposed inverse QR decomposition in terms of convergence rate, steady-state/residual mean square error (MSE), and bit error rate (BER), in comparison with standard blind constant modulus algorithm (CMA) and recursive least squares (RLS-CMA). Assuming infinite precision, the IQRD-CMA and RLS-CMA achieve similar performance and induce the same computational complexity; however, both largely outperform standard CMA for wide ranges of CD and PMD. However, for finite precision hardware, compared with RLS-CMA, the proposed blind IQRD-CMA clearly achieves one order of BER magnitude at 8- and 10-b resolutions, and further reduces the steady-state MSE by 3 dB. Moreover, results show that IQRD-CMA maintains the system stability at acceptable number of bits resolutions. In addition, this letter addresses the tradeoff between the complexity and the performance of all these equalizers for several precision settings.