Successive Four-Dimensional Stokes-Space Direct Detection

Recently, the authors of [1] have presented the Stokes-vector direct detection transceiver as a promising candidate for noncoherent short-haul fiber-optic communication. Their method was improved by MorsyOsman, et al. in [2] to exploit all four transmitted signal-space dimensions, but their proposed methods for detecting the fourth dimension all suffer various practical drawbacks. In this paper we propose a successive detection scheme with the same optical receiver structure as [2], but with some additional computations in the electrical domain. We show that the additional achievable information rate of the subchannel carried by the fourth dimension can be quite substantial.