Nonlinear phase noise in coherent optical OFDM transmission systems.

We derive an analytical formula to estimate the variance of nonlinear phase noise caused by the interaction of amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise with fiber nonlinearity such as self-phase modulation (SPM), cross-phase modulation (XPM), and four-wave mixing (FWM) in coherent orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. The analytical results agree very well with numerical simulations, enabling the study of the nonlinear penalties in long-haul coherent OFDM systems without extensive numerical simulation. Our results show that the nonlinear phase noise induced by FWM is significantly larger than that induced by SPM and XPM, which is in contrast to traditional WDM systems where ASE-FWM interaction is negligible in quasi-linear systems. We also found that fiber chromatic dispersion can reduce the nonlinear phase noise. The variance of the total phase noise increases linearly with the bit rate, and does not depend significantly on the number of subcarriers for systems with moderate fiber chromatic dispersion.