Direct detection all optical OFDM transmission with fiber penalty mitigation

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed an increasing demand on bandwidth due to emerging technologies such as cloud computing, and high definition video streaming, etc. This increasing demand requires a continuous increase in the internet backbone capacity and communication data rates especially for intra and inter-continental transport. The optical communications technology, as the only candidate that can satisfy such high demands, has been witnessing massive improvements and novel techniques to tackle issues such as increasing data rates and transmission distance in addition to reducing energy footprint. Recent advances have shown a remarkable improvements in data rates reaching up to more than 1 Pbps using advanced modulation formats, wave division multiplexing (WDM), space division multiplexing (SDM), and coherent detection. These kinds of systems face three major drawbacks: o The first problem is the use of WDM carriers with large bandwidth which requires high speed ADCs and receiver ICs that are currently not existent in the state of the art devices, this is why such kind of research proposals use off-line processing at the receiver to measure bit error rate (BER), and so, the implementation of these systems is left for future implementation. In addition, the use of high bandwidth WDM carriers imposes limitations on the granularity of carriers. A solution for this problem would be the use of the recently popular orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) which creates multiple subcarriers with relatively narrow bandwidth that is suitable for the state of the art receivers, provides scalability, and accepts fine granularity while maintaining high spectral efficiency. i o The second drawback is the massive energy that is required by the complex DSP circuitry for coherent detection, frequency and time equalization, etc. The energy problem is gaining less attention from the community in the existence of a race towards high data rates, while it is known that the ...