Hardware-efficient blind frequency offset estimation for digital subcarrier multiplexing signals.

Since the frequency offset estimation (FOE) must be implemented before the subcarrier de-multiplexing and chromatic dispersion compensation (CDC) for digital subcarrier multiplexing (DSM) signals, traditional FOE algorithms for single carrier transmission is no longer suitable. Here, we propose a hardware-efficient blind FOE solution for the DSM signals by monitoring spectral dips in the frequency domain. With the use of a smoothing filter, the estimation accuracy of FOE can be significantly increased. Moreover, we identify that the proposed FOE method is robust to various transmission impairments, including amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise, optical filtering, and fiber nonlinearity. The effective function of the proposed FOE method is numerically and experimentally verified under scenarios of both back-to-back (B2B) and the 2560 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission, leading to a FOE error less than 100 MHz with a FFT size of 1024.