Modulation format identification (MFI) is a critical technology for autonomous digital coherent receivers in next-generation elastic optical networks. A novel and simple MFI scheme, to the best of our knowledge, based on signal envelope flatness is proposed without requiring any training or other prior information. After amplitude normalization and partition, the incoming polarization division multiplexed (PDM) signals can be classified into quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK), 8 quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), 16QAM, and 64QAM signals according to envelope flatnesses R 1 , R 2 , and R 3 of signals in different amplitude ranges. The feasibility of the proposed MFI scheme is first verified via numerical simulations with 28 GBaud PDM-QPSK/-8QAM/-16QAM/-64QAM signals. Only by using 4000 symbols can the proposed MFI scheme achieve a 100% correct identification rate for the four modulation formats over a wide optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) range. Proof-of-concept experiments among 28 GBaud PDM-QPSK/-8QAM/-16QAM systems under back-to-back and long-haul fiber transmission links are implemented to further demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MFI scheme. The experimental results show that the proposed MFI scheme can obtain a 100% correct identification rate when the OSNR value of each modulation format is higher than the threshold corresponding to 7% FEC and is resilient towards fiber nonlinearities. More importantly, the proposed MFI scheme can significantly reduce computational complexity.

In this work, a prior-training-free and low-complexity modulation format identification (MFI) scheme, based on amplitude histogram distributions, was proposed and demonstrated, both numerically and experimentally, for autonomous digital coherent receivers. In the proposed scheme, after having performed power normalization, incoming polarization division multiplexed (PDM) signals were classified into QPSK, 8QAM, 16QAM, 32QAM and 64QAM signals, according to their ratios. Ratios were defined according to specific features of their amplitude histograms. The proposed MFI scheme used only amplitude information. As such, it was insensitive to carrier phase noise. Furthermore, the proposed scheme did not require any prior information, such as optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). The performance of the proposed MFI scheme was numerically verified using 28GBaud PDM-QPSK/-8QAM/-16QAM/-32QAM/-64QAM signals. The numerical simulation results showed that the proposed scheme was able achieve a 100% correct identification rate for all five modulation formats when their OSNR values were higher than the thresholds corresponding to the 20% FEC correcting bit error rate (BER) of 2.4 × 10−2. To further explore the effectiveness of the proposed MFI scheme, proof-of-concept experiments in 28GBaud PDM-QPSK/-8QAM/-16QAM, and 21.5GBaud PDM-32QAM transmission systems were also undertaken, which showed that the proposed scheme as robust against fiber nonlinearities. To explore the scheme’s feasibility for use in practical transmission systems, the computational complexity analysis of the proposed scheme was conducted. It showed that, compared with relevant MFI schemes, the proposed MFI scheme was able to significantly reduce the computational complexity.