RF-pilot aided modulation format identification for hitless coherent transceiver.

We propose a RF-pilot aided modulation format identification (MFI) technique to enable a hitless flexible coherent transceiver with fast format switching. For the MFI, modulation format information is encoded to the amplitude of the RF-pilot, which can be simultaneously used for the compensation of both laser phase noise and fiber nonlinearity. The proposed MFI technique is able to identify arbitrary modulation formats including multi-dimensional formats and hybrid QAM formats. The high accuracy of the proposed MFI scheme is experimentally demonstrated without sacrificing the tolerance of both laser phase noise and fiber nonlinearity for various modulation formats up to dual-polarization (DP) 64QAM. Finally, over 2240 km standard single mode fiber (SSMF) link, we experimentally demonstrate a hitless coherent transceiver with a fast block-by-block modulation format switching enabled by the proposed MFI.