I. Introduction
Benefiting from the incredible advancements of digital signal processing (DSP) techniques, linear fiber optical transmission impairments can be completely compensated at the receiver side. Thus, the transmission performance can be easily evaluated by optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). Being directly related to the bit error ratio (BER), OSNR has become one of the most vital monitoring parameters during the optical performance monitoring (OPM). OSNR monitoring is essential to the reliable and reconfigurable optical network, in order to enable flexible impairment-aware routing for agile optical transmission. Currently, fiber optical coherent communication has become a popular choice of transmission system, in order to increase spectral efficiency (SE) as well as transmission capacity [1]. Until now, there exist lots of OSNR monitoring techniques for coherent fiber optical transmission systems. As for the Golay sequences-based monitoring technique [2], OSNR was monitored after the acquisition of channel information. Furthermore, additional data sequences were compulsory for the OSNR monitoring, leading to the spectral efficiency (SE) penalty of fiber optical transmission. When the delay-line interferometer [3] and offset filtering together with optical power measurement [4] were employed for the purpose of OSNR monitoring, additional photonic components like interferometers or optical filters were required, indicating of both high implementation complexity and modulation format sensitive operation. For the polarization nulling based OSNR monitoring method [5], the modulation format of signal is limited to non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signal, and such method cannot support the polarization division multiplexing (PDM) technique. Due to the use of complicated algorithms and additional photonic components, the response times of these OSNR monitoring schemes were inconvenient for the real-time in-situ operation. Meanwhile, the maximum error of OSNR monitoring can reach 3.1 dB. Thus, these OSNR monitoring methods cannot realize OSNR monitoring with a high accuracy, which may hinder the OPM applications. A practical OSNR monitoring scheme should be easily implemented and the implementation cost should be kept as low as possible. Moreover, the monitoring solution should be applied to various modulation formats with variable baud-rates. Therefore, the ideal OSNR monitoring technique is able to extract the OSNR information from the incoming optical signals with minimum prior knowledge.