Pilot-free common phase error estimation for CO-OFDM with improved spectral efficiency

We propose an improved pilot free phase noise mitigation algorithm for CO-OFDM systems using weighted multi-level QPSK partitioning and Kalman filtering. Through extensive Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate an improvement in spectral efficiency of >6% in case of 200 Gbps single channel and 1 Tbps multi channel 16QAM CO-OFDM transmission with blind carrier phase estimation. We also experimentally demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm against the standard pilot aided algorithm for the transmission of 120 Gbps 16QAM CO-OFDM at different noise levels.