Coherent optical fiber communications had a brief period of popularity in the early 1990s, mainly because the optical links of that day were significantly power-limited. Coherent detection provided a possibility of optically amplifying the signal to a power level that, after photodetection, made the thermal noise negligible. Two things, however, caused those coherent systems to be abandoned. The first was the sheer technical difficulties: a coherent receiver requires a local oscillator laser that is to be phase-and polarization-locked to the received signal. This gave rise to significant technical obstacles, and only a few limited and expensive coherent receiver solutions were demonstrated [17,26]. The second was the development of the Erbium-doper fiber amplifier (EDFA) that provided an elegant and practical solution to the problem of the thermal noise. By 1995, the EDFA was a commodity in fiber communication systems, simple on-off keying modulation worked well enough, and coherent communication was forgotten. However, coherent transmission systems got renewed attention around 2005 [12, 34]. This time the motivation was entirely different. A coherent receiver gives access to both the optical phase and amplitude, which provides two important benefits; (i) advanced multilevel modulation formats can be used, that can improve the spectral efficiency; and (ii) electronic distortion mitigation can be used, as the optical field is directly mapped to the electrical signal. Moreover, the practical problems with the coherent detection could now be solved by performing the phase-and polarization tracking by fast digital signal processing. This enabled a third significant