Beaconless Auto-Alignment for Single-Wavelength 5 Tbit/s Mode-Division Multiplexing Free-Space Optical Communications

Mode-division multiplexing has shown its ability to significantly increase the capacity of free-space optical communications. An accurate alignment is crucial to enable such links due to possible performance degradation induced by mode crosstalk and narrow beam divergence. Conventionally, a beacon beam is necessary for system alignment due to multiple local maximums in the mode-division multiplexed beam profile. However, the beacon beam introduces excess system complexity, power consumption, and alignment errors. Here we demonstrate a beaconless system with significantly higher alignment accuracy and faster acquisition. This system also excludes excess complexity, power consumption, and alignment errors, facilitating simplified system calibration and supporting a record-high 5.14 Tbit/s line rate in a single-wavelength free-space optical link. We anticipate our paper to be a starting point for more sophisticated alignment scenarios in future multi-Terabit mode-division multiplexing free-space optical communications for long-distance applications with a generalised mode basis.

CRLB Approaching Pilot-aided Phase and Channel Estimation Algorithm in MIMO Systems with Phase Noise and Quasi-Static Channel Fading

This paper derives a novel pilot-aided phase and channel estimation algorithm for multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with phase noise and quasi-static channel fading. Our novel approach allows, for the first time, carrier phase estimation and recovery to be performed before full channel estimation. This in turn enables the channel estimation to be calculated using the whole frame, significantly improving its accuracy. The proposed algorithm is a sequential combination of several linear algorithms, which greatly reduces the computational complexity. Moreover, we also derive, for the first time, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for a MIMO system, where phase noise is estimated using only angular information. Our numerical results show that the performance of our phase estimation algorithm is close to the proposed CRLB. Moreover, when compared with the conventional Kalman based algorithms, our proposed algorithm significantly improves the system BER performance.