IQ imbalance compensation based on maximum SNR estimation in coherent QPSK systems

We present a simple alternative method for the compensation of quadrature imbalance in optical quadrature phase-shift-keying (QPSK) coherent systems. The method is based on the determination and the compensation of the phase mismatch by the introduction of a relevant signal-to-noise ratio metric. The principle is validated numerically and the algorithm is validated experimentally through bit-error-rate (BER) and error vector magnitude (EVM) measurements. A 20 Gb/s optical QPSK experiment reveals a good agreement of the proposed method with the Gram-Schmidt orthogonalization procedure (GSOP). Moreover, the robustness of both methods was verified with up to 30° phase misalignment by comparing the signal after phase imbalance compensation to that without compensation. A 10% reduction of EVM is achieved with our method for a high phase misalignment of 30°.