High Spectral Efficiency PM-128QAM Comb-Based Superchannel Transmission Enabled by a Single Shared Optical Pilot Tone

We exploit the coherence of frequency combs for high spectral efficiency superchannel transmission via effective sharing of a single pilot tone. By phase-locking the receiver comb to the transmitted pilot tone, carrier offsets are suppressed while both the overhead and complexity associated with the pilot tone are reduced. We form a 55 carrier superchannel using a 25-GHz spaced electro-optic frequency comb seeded by a 100-kHz linewidth laser. At a pilot tone overhead of <2%, the reduction in carrier offsets is shown to facilitate blind DSP-based carrier recovery of all 54 x 24 Gbaud PM-128QAM data channels. The resulting superchannel spectral efficiency is 10.3 bits/s/Hz assuming a 28% overhead for forward error correction. Our results show the potential for optical pilot tones to reduce both overhead and complexity in systems using comb-based superchannels together with high-order modulation formats.