Abstract
Pol-Mux transmission is a well established technique that enhances spectral efficiency by simultaneously transmitting over horizontal and vertical polarizations of the electrical field. However, cross-coupling of the two polarizations impairs transmission. Under the assumption that the cross-coupling matrix is a Markov process with free-running state, we propose upper and lower bounds to the information rate that can be transferred through the channel. Simulation results show that the two bounds are tight for values of the cross-coupling power of practical interest and modulation formats up to 16-QAM (quadrature amplitude modulation).
© 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement
1. Introduction
Simultaneous transmission of modulated signals over the horizontal and vertical polarizations of the electrical field is a well established technique [1–3] that allows to improve spectral efficiency by using the same frequency twice. In its essence, this technique relies upon the principle of MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) systems, that have become popular after the seminal paper [4]. To cancel interference arising from non-ideal orthogonality between the horizontal and the vertical polarizations, linear processing can be adopted [5], even if it is well known that non-linear techniques achieve better performance in presence of interference and additive noise, see e.g. [6, 7].
Either implicitly or explicitly, most of the receivers studied in the literature assume that the MIMO channel matrix is static or quasi-static. However, the experimental results of [6] show that the coherence time of the channel is quite small, say, in the order of 10 to 30 symbol intervals for 112 Gb/s dual-polarization QPSK (Quadrature Phase Shift Keying). Hence tracking the channel becomes an issue. Tracking techniques can be based on pilot symbols, as proposed, for instance, in [8], but, independently of the channel tracking method, a low coherence time of the channel matrix, hence a fast time-varying channel, will make noisy the channel estimate (in practice only a short time window spanning a few signal samples can be used for channel estimation at a given time instant) thus impacting the information rate that can be transmitted through the channel. This observation motivates the study of the information rate transferred through the Pol-Mux channel. Channel capacity of the fading MIMO channel is a classical topic in the general framework of information theory, see e.g. [9] and, in that context, also the information rate of channels with free-running state has been studied [10]. In the context of optical transmission the information rate is well studied for the phase noise channel, at least for the channel model with free-running state, see e.g. [11–13], but less has been done for the Pol-Mux channel, which can be seen indeed as a variant of the phase noise channel where
Therefore, starting from the lower bound for the phase noise channel of [13], we adapt it here to the Pol-Mux channel and introduce a new upper bound based on the Kalman filter.2. Channel model
Let the lowercase characters indicate possibly complex scalars and column vectors and let the uppercase characters indicate matrices. The notation is used to indicate a column vector (or matrix, when the elements are vectors) made by the chunk of sequence (ak, ak+1, ⋯, ak+i)T, while {ak} is used to indicate the semi-infinite sequence (a0, a1, ⋯). The notation is used to indicate the m × m identity matrix and the superscript H denotes Hermitian transposition. The output of the Pol-Mux channel at time k is
where xk is the k-th sample of the i.i.d. input modulation complex vector data sequence, with zero mean vector and covariance matrix Mk is the channel matrix and wk is the k-th element of the i.i.d. complex Gaussian vector noise sequence with zero mean vector and covariance matrix For small to moderate polarization crosstalk, the matrix Mk can be modelled as [6] where is the k-th element of a complex Gaussian random vector sequence which is hereafter modelled here as a free-running 1-causal ARMA (Autoregressive Moving Average) process, hence where vk is the k-th sample of a white Gaussian random vector sequence with zero mean and covariance matrix In other words, {λk} is the filtered version of {vk}, where the filter is made of two shift registers, one for {v1,k} and the other one for {v2,k}, each one with m memories, and with 1-causal feedback taps and 1-causal forward taps , with Using the z-transform you write whereTo cast the model in the framework of linear dynamic systems we need to define the state of the system. To this aim, let us define the vector sequence
hence is the content of the two shift registers at the k-th channel use. Note that λk depends only on as and, given the sequence is independent of . Therefore you can take as the state of the linear dynamic system at time k, thus writing the measurement equation and the state transition equation as with where is a column vector of m zeros, and the 2(m + 1) × 2(m + 1) state transition matrix is where and is the all-zero square matrix of size m × m. The state transition probability is where gc(µ, Σm; x) indicates a m-dimensional complex Gaussian probability density function over the complex vector space spanned by x with mean vector µ and covariance matrix Σm and Q is the covariance matrix of the process noise , that is with The joint source and channel output probability, given the hidden state, is whereThe conditional probability of channel output given the hidden state is
3. Upper and lower bounds to the information rate by the Kalman filter
Let
where, for conventional M-QAM (Multi-Level Quadrature Amplitude Modulation) and M-PSK (Multi-Level Phase Shift Keying) For the conditional entropy, by chain rule one writes which, by the Shannon-McMillan-Breiman theorem, can be evaluated asSince conditioning does not increase entropy, we have the following upper and lower bounds to the conditional entropy
that one can use in a straightforward way in the right side of (22) together with (23) to get lower and upper bounds to the information rate.Let us consider the upper bound (26). The probabilities inside the logarithm can be evaluated by the Kalman filter as follows. The knowledge of past transmitted symbols that appear in the conditioning is imported in the Kalman filter by including all the conditions in the measurement, hence by updating the Kalman filter in data-aided mode. Let us write the channel output as
The predicted measurement at time k is where denotes the state predicted by the Kalman filter at time k, that is the expectation of the hidden state given past measurements As innovations process we take Starting from an initial pair , where for k = 1, 2, ⋯, the state prediction vector and the prediction error covariance matrix evolve as whereThe desired probability is evaluated as
where, using the predicted state and the prediction error covariance matrix computed by the Kalman filter, one has Similarly, for the lower bound to the conditional entropy, one has with where and are the estimates produced by combining a forward and a backward Kalman filter as4. Simulation results
The consideration of realistic spectra of the cross-pol coefficients is out of the scope of the present paper and we left it to future studies. For practical methods, to estimate the strength of cross-pol interference the reader is referred to [6], where the strength of interference is given by the autocorrelation of interference at time zero. In the following we express the strength of interference by using the SIR (Signal-to-Interference Ratio), which is the inverse of the interference autocorrelation at time zero. To derive simulation results, we set ρ = 0 and for each one of the two random coefficients appearing in the Pol-Mux matrix we take the first-order ARMA model
where −1 < zp < 1 is the pole of the first-order ARMA model. The filtered sequence has zero mean, unit power spectral density at frequency zero and power hence the SIR isIn the common case where zp is close to 1, the filtered sequence is a first-order low-pass random sequence with −3 dB normalized bandwidth
Figure 1 gives the upper and lower bounds to the information rate of 4-QAM, 16-QAM and 64-QAM obtained with zp = 0.977, corresponding to SIR=19.3 dB. With such moderate interference the two bounds are close to each other, also for 64-QAM. Moreover, at high values of SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) information rates reach the maximum value allowed by the constellation sizes, achievable with the pure AWGN (Additive White Gaussian Noise) channel: 4 bits for 2 × 4-QAM, 8 bits for 2 × 16-QAM and 12 bits for 2 × 64-QAM.
Figure 2 gives the same upper and lower bounds obtained with zp = 0.887, that is SIR=12.2 dB. In the practice it seems to be a strong interference condition, since the minimum SIR reported in the experimental results of [6] is around 14 dB. In this case, the information rate with 64-QAM and at high SNR remains well below the information rate achieved with the AWGN channel, thus confirming that the Pol-Mux interference becomes the limiting factor of the information rate transferred through the channel. We also note that the spread between upper and lower bounds becomes large with 64-QAM and at high SNR, where the capability of tracking the MIMO channel becomes crucial. Actually, the lower bound renounces to the blind part of tracking thus renouncing to some tracking capability, while the upper bound upgrades the blind tracking to a data-aided tracking, thus enhancing tracking capabilities over what can actually be done.
5. Conclusions
We have proposed upper and lower bounds to the information rate of the Pol-Mux channel and shown simulation results for a specific channel model. The results show that with moderate interference our bounds are so close that virtually compute the exact information rate. For strong interference and modulation formats with high spectral efficiency there is still some spread between the two, leaving space to future investigations.
References and links
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