The unacceptably high cost of digital coherent receivers for short-range optical communication has in recent years fueled the study of alternative transmission schemes that are simultaneously highly performing and cost-effective. However, the proposed solutions (e.g., Kramers–Kronig receiver) usually require the cooperation of a transmitting end, which is unachievable in the context of non-cooperative communication. In this work, we mainly studied a dual-polarization quadrature phase-shift-keying (DP-QPSK) non-coherent reception scheme based on a delay-line interferometer (DLI) and measures to improve the reception performance. A data recovery algorithm was proposed for DLI-based DP-QPSK demodulation. The simulation results demonstrated that the algorithm could accurately recover the raw data from the transmitter. Moreover, decreasing the differential delay of the DLI could effectively increase the chromatic dispersion tolerance of the receiver and the optimal delay scaled inversely with the chromatic dispersion. It was found that a DLI-based DP-QPSK reception scheme is a better choice for short-range, non-cooperative communication with less severe transmission impairments.
DLI-Based DP-QPSK Reception Scheme for Short-Range Optical Communication