A pilot-based blind (PBB) phase estimation method for the coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) system is demonstrated in this paper. Instead of inserting the pilot-subcarriers that are loaded with the already known information in the OFDM signal, the unknown and specially designed signal is used to replace the signal on the pilot subcarriers to decrease the waste of spectrum and has demonstrated good performance in the phase noise compensation. Therefore, the spectral efficiency (SE) is further improved compared with the conventional pilot-aided (PA) phase noise estimation method. Both the proposed PBB and conventional PA estimation methods are compared in a CO-OFDM transmission experiment, which is modulated by 4 quadrature amplitude modulation (4-QAM) formats and transmitted over 1760-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) without optical dispersion compensation. The experimental results show that the proposed PBB method can achieve the similar performance as the conventional PA method.
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