Unscented Kalman Filter with Joint Decision Scheme for Phase Estimation in Probabilistically Shaped QAM Systems

A carrier phase estimation method based on the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) is proposed for probabilistically shaped (PS) quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) systems. We further integrate a joint decision scheme into the proposed UKF-based algorithm to prevent the correlated erroneous decisions in the phase recovery scheme caused by the impact of PS. The proposed method achieves the performance benefit for PS constellations in optical transmissions by partitioning the constellation symbols suitably and utilizing both the maximum a posterior probability (MAP) and maximum likelihood (ML) detection. The results of numerical simulation and experimental verification reveal that the proposed method performs better than the conventional CPR algorithms in PS systems.