Polarization tracking and signal equalization for optical receivers configured for on-off keying or pulse amplitude modulation signaling

A method of recovering data carried by a modulated optical carrier, the method comprising:

• producing a sequence of vector pairs having first and second digital vectors, each first digital vector being indicative of a complex value of a first polarization component of the modulated optical carrier at a corresponding sampling time, and each second digital vector being indicative of a complex value of a different second polarization component of the modulated optical carrier at the sampling time;
• performing a rotation on a vector pair from said sequence in a manner that tends to compensate for polarization rotation produced during transmission of the modulated optical carrier from an optical transmitter thereof to an optical receiver, which is adapted to recover said data from vectors resulting from the performed rotation;
• and
• recursively updating an angle of the rotation by an amount proportional to a value of energy difference between vectors of a vector pair produced by a previous rotation of a previous vector pair having the corresponding first and second vectors.

An apparatus, comprising an optical receiver adapted to recover on-off keying (OOK) or pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) data carried by a modulated optical carrier, wherein the optical receiver comprises:

• an optical detector adapted to produce a sequence of first digital vectors, each first digital vector being indicative of a complex value of a first polarization component of the modulated optical carrier at a corresponding sampling time;
• and
• a digital processor being connected to receive the sequence of said first digital vectors and being adapted to estimate values of said OOK or PAM data based on the received sequence of said first digital vectors in a manner responsive to values of energy errors in said estimated values, wherein the digital processor comprises:
• a digital filter adapted to equalize a selected portion of the received sequence using a plurality of weighting coefficients, each applied to a corresponding one of the first digital vectors from said portion;
• a squaring module coupled to the output of the digital filter and adapted to determine the energy corresponding to the equalized portion;
• and
• a weight updating unit adapted to adaptively determine said weighting coefficients based on a value of energy error for the equalized portion and to supply said determined weighting coefficients for use in the digital filter, wherein the digital filter comprises:
• (n−1) serially connected delay elements, with the sequence of said first digital vectors being applied to a first delay element of the series and propagating in a pipeline manner through the series, where n is an integer greater than 1 that defines the length of the selected portion;
• and
• n weighting blocks, a first of which is coupled to an input of the first delay element and each of the remaining (n−1) of which is coupled to an output of the corresponding one of the (n−1) delay elements, wherein each of said weighting blocks is adapted to apply to the corresponding first digital vector a corresponding weighting coefficient received from the weight updating unit.