Alamouti-type polarization-time coding in coded-modulation schemes with coherent detection.

We present the Almouti-type polarization-time (PT) coding scheme suitable for use in multilevel (M>or=2) block-coded modulation schemes with coherent detection. The PT-decoder is found it to be similar to the Alamouti combiner. We also describe how to determine the symbols log-likelihood ratios in the presence of laser phase noise. We show that the proposed scheme is able to compensate even 800 ps of differential group delay, for the system operating at 10 Gb/s, with negligible penalty. The proposed scheme outperforms equal-gain combining polarization diversity OFDM scheme. However, the polarization diversity coded-OFDM and PT-coding based coded-OFDM schemes perform comparable. The proposed scheme has the potential of doubling the spectral efficiency compared to polarization diversity schemes.