On the Performance of Joint-Core Carrier-Phase Estimation in the Presence of Intercore Skew

The sharing of lasers in space-division multiplexed multicore-fiber transmission yields correlated phase noise across the spatial channels. As a result, system performance can be improved through the use of joint-core carrier-phase estimation (CPE). However, the presence of intercore skew can reduce the potential of such schemes. This paper studies the effects of skew on pilot-aided joint-core CPE, where via simulations, it is shown that joint-core processing can be made to perform similarly to or better than separate-core processing for any amount of skew. It is shown that for a given signal-to-noise ratio and skew, the performance of joint-core CPE relative to separate-core CPE is highly dependent on the ratio of the light-source linewidth to the local oscillator (LO) linewidth. In general, the performance of joint-core CPE in the presence of skew improves as the LO linewidth decreases compared to the light-source laser linewidth, assuming that the spatial channels are digitally realigned at the receiver.