Front-End Specifications Impact on Kramers-Kronig Self-Coherent Systems

This work evaluates the requirements in terms of resolution and bandwidth of digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters and linewidth of lasers in a system with Kramers-Kronig receiver with receive-side laser and polarization multiplexing. The results indicate that spectral efficiency and lasers' linewidth requirements are close to those of coherent systems, but demanding twice the bandwidth of the analog-to-digital converter. Therefore, employing KK to replace coherent reception will require a careful analysis of energy consumption, performance and complexity trade-off, taking into account that KK demands a front-end with more complex specifications to achieve the desired performance.