Real-Time 2.5 GS/s Coherent Optical Receiver for 53.3-Gb/s Sub-Banded OFDM

A real-time receiver for the coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) detection is realized in a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). Each building block of the CO-OFDM receiver, such as symbol synchronization, channel estimation, and phase estimation is described and discussed in respect of special technical requirements of real-time implementation. The real-time receiver is successfully demonstrated with a receiver sampling rate of 2.5-Gsamples/s to receive a subband of 53.3-Gb/s multiband CO-OFDM signal. The measured bit error rate (BER) is as low as 3.7 × 10 -8 which is a record in real-time or offline CO-OFDM demonstration.