Generation and transmission of 85.4 Gb/s realtime 16QAM coherent optical OFDM signals over 400 km SSMF with preamble-less reception

This paper presents a real-time, coherent optical OFDM transmitter based on a field programmable gate array implementation. The transmitter uses 16QAM mapping and runs at 28 GSa/s achieving a data rate of 85.4 Gb/s on a single polarization. A cyclic prefix of 25% of the symbol duration is added enabling dispersion-tolerant transmission over up to 400 km of SSMF. This is the first transmission experiment performed with a real-time OFDM transmitter running at data rates higher than 40 Gb/s. A key aspect of the paper is the introduction of a novel method for OFDM symbol synchronization without relying on training symbols. Unlike conventional preamble-based synchronization methods which perform cross-correlations at regular time intervals and let the system run freely in between, the proposed method performs synchronization in a continuous manner ensuring correct symbol alignment at all times.