Experimental Investigation of the Effect of Pilot Tone Modulation on Partial Response Modulation Formats

TL;DR

This paper experimentally examines how pilot tone modulation depth affects various partial response modulation formats, revealing that increased pilot tone depth causes significant power penalties, especially at higher signal amplitudes.

Contribution

It provides empirical data on the impact of pilot tone modulation on NRZ, PAM4, and Duobinary formats, highlighting the power penalties involved.

Findings

Pilot tone penalty increases with signal amplitude.

Maximum received power penalty observed is 3 dB.

Impact varies across different modulation formats.

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental investigation of 8% pilot tone modulation depth is a system transmitting NRZ, PAM4 and Duobinary. The penalty from the pilot tone increases with signal amplitude levels and reaches a received power penalty of 3 dB.