Experimental Demonstration and Numerical Simulation of 107-Gb/s High Spectral Efficiency Coherent Optical OFDM

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Abstract
Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a multicarrier modulation format in which the data are transmitted with a set of orthogonal subcarriers. Recently, this modulation format has been actively explored in the field of optical communications to take advantages of its high spectral efficiency and resilience to chromatic and polarization dispersion. However, to realize the optical OFDM at 100 Gb/s and beyond requires extremely high electronic bandwidth for the electronic signal processing elements. In this paper, we investigate orthogonal-band-multiplexed OFDM (OBM-OFDM) as a suitable modulation and multiplexing scheme for achieving bandwidth scalable and spectral efficient long-haul transmission systems. The OBM-OFDM signal can be implemented in either RF domain, or optical domain, or a combination of both domains. Using the scheme of OBM-OFDM, we show the successful transmission of 107 Gb/s data rate over 1000-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) without optical dispersion compensation and without Raman amplification. The demonstrated OBM-OFDM system is realized in optical domain which employs 2times2 MIMO-OFDM signal processing and achieves high optical spectral efficiency of 3.3 bit/s/Hz using 4-QAM encoding. Additionally, we perform numerical simulation of 107-Gb/s CO-OFDM transmission for both single-channel and wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) systems. We find that the Q -factor of OBM-OFDM measured using uniform filling of OFDM subbands is in fact more conservative, in particular, is 1.2 dB and 0.4 dB lower than using random filling for single-channel and WDM systems, respectively.