Driven primarily by cloud service and data-center applications, short-reach optical communication has become a key market segment and growing research area in recent years. Short-reach systems are characterized by direct detection-based receiver configurations and other low-cost and small form factor components that induce transmission impairments unforeseen in their coherent counterparts. Innovative signaling and digital signal processing (DSP) play a pivotal role in enabling these components to realize their ultimate potentials and meet data rate requirements in cost-effective manners. This paper presents an overview of recent DSP developments for short-reach communications systems and discusses future trends.

Digital Signal Processing for Short-Reach Optical Communications: A Review of Current Technologies and Future Trends

Advanced modulation formats combined with digital signal processing and direct detection is a promising way to realize high capacity, low cost and power efficient short reach optical transmission system. In this paper, we present a detailed investigation on the performance of three advanced modulation formats for 100 Gb/s short reach transmission system. They are PAM-4, CAP-16 and DMT. The detailed digital signal processing required for each modulation format is presented. Comprehensive simulations are carried out to evaluate the performance of each modulation format in terms of received optical power, transmitter bandwidth, relative intensity noise and thermal noise. The performance of each modulation format is also experimentally studied. To the best of our knowledge, we report the first demonstration of a 112 Gb/s transmission over 10km of SSMF employing single band CAP-16 with EML. Finally, a comparison of computational complexity of DSP for the three formats is presented.

Experimental study of PAM-4, CAP-16, and DMT for 100 Gb/s Short Reach Optical Transmission Systems

The field of visible light communications (VLC) has gained significant interest over the last decade, in both fibre and free-space embodiments. In fibre systems, the availability of low cost plastic optical fibre (POF) that is compatible with visible data communications has been a key enabler. In free-space applications, the availability of hundreds of THz of the unregulated spectrum makes VLC attractive for wireless communications. This paper provides an overview of the recent developments in VLC systems based on gallium nitride (GaN) light-emitting diodes (LEDs), covering aspects from sources to systems. The state-of-the-art technology enabling bandwidth of GaN LEDs in the range of >400 MHz is explored. Furthermore, advances in key technologies, including advanced modulation, equalisation, and multiplexing that have enabled free-space VLC data rates beyond 10 Gb/s are also outlined.

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A review of gallium nitride LEDs for multi-gigabit-per-second visible light data communications

We present a Silicon Photonic (SiP) intensity modulator operating at 1.3 μm with pulse amplitude modulation formats for short reach transmission employing a digital to analog converter for the RF signal generator, enabling pulse shaping and precompensation of the transmitter's frequency response. Details of the SiP Mach-Zehnder interfometer are presented. We study the system performance at various bit rates, PAM orders and propagation distances. To the best of our knowledge, we report the first demonstration of a 112 Gb/s transmission over 10 km of SMF fiber operating below pre-FEC BER threshold of 3.8 × 10(-3) employing PAM-8 at 37.4 Gbaud using a fully packaged SiP modulator. An analytical model for the Q-factor metric applicable for multilevel PAM-N signaling is derived and accurately experimentally verified in the case of Gaussian noise limited detection. System performance is experimentally investigated and it is demonstrated that PAM order selection can be optimally chosen as a function of the desired throughput. We demonstrate the ability of the proposed transmitter to exhibit software-defined transmission for short reach applications by selecting PAM order, symbol rate and pulse shape.

Experimental study of 112 Gb/s short reach transmission employing PAM formats and SiP intensity modulator at 1.3 μm.

For short-reach links, direct detection offers the advantages of low cost and low complexity. Discrete multitone (DMT) is a promising format due to its high spectral efficiency, flexibility and tolerance to chromatic dispersion (CD). In this study, we experimentally demonstrate a beyond 100-Gb/s DMT transmission over 80-km single mode fiber (SMF) without CD compensation. Using dual-drive Mach–Zehnder modulator-assisted single-sideband modulation, CD-induced power fading is eliminated after direct detection. Trellis coder modulation (TCM) is used to increase the Euclidean distance of the constellation points and nonlinearity equalization (NLE) is employed to mitigate system nonlinearities. Both TCM and NLE algorithms have contributions to improve the system performance. The experimental results show that high capacities up to 122, 110 and 105 Gb/s are achieved with bit error rate at 4.5 × 10−3 for back to back, 40- and 80-km SMF transmissions, respectively. The required OSNR after 80-km SMF transmission is 34.2 dB. To the best of our knowledge, this study reports the lowest required OSNR and highest capacity for C-band direct-detection transmission over 80-km SMF.

Beyond 100-Gb/s Transmission Over 80-km SMF Using Direct-Detection SSB-DMT at C-Band

Short range optical data links are experiencing bandwidth limitations making it very challenging to cope with the growing data transmission capacity demands. Parallel optics appears as a valid short-term solution. It is, however, not a viable solution in the long-term because of its complex optical packaging. Therefore, increasing effort is now put into the possibility of exploiting higher order modulation formats with increased spectral efficiency and reduced optical transceiver complexity. As these type of links are based on intensity modulation and direct detection, modulation formats relying on optical coherent detection can not be straight forwardly employed. As an alternative and more viable solution, this paper proposes the use of carrierless amplitude phase (CAP) in a novel multiband approach (MultiCAP) that achieves record spectral efficiency, increases tolerance towards dispersion and bandwidth limitations, and reduces the complexity of the transceiver. We report on numerical simulations and experimental demonstrations with capacity beyond 100 Gb/s transmission using a single externally modulated laser. In addition, an extensive comparison with conventional CAP is also provided. The reported experiment uses MultiCAP to achieve 102.4 Gb/s transmission, corresponding to a data payload of 95.2 Gb/s error free transmission by using a 7% forward error correction code. The signal is successfully recovered after 15 km of standard single mode fiber in a system limited by a 3 dB bandwidth of 14 GHz.

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Multiband Carrierless Amplitude Phase Modulation for High Capacity Optical Data Links

Besides the long-haul optical networks covering over thousands of kilometers for backbone transmission, short reach optical networks (SR-ONs) are widely deployed in metro-area for aggregation and accessing. The SR-ONs include the metro optical transport networks (Metro-OTN), optical access networks or other optical inter-connection systems with even shorter distance. As predicted, the growing bandwidth demanding from SR-ONs will be much more than that from the long-haul optical networks in the near future. Besides, there are tremendous amounts of optical terminals and end-users in SR-ONs compared with the long-haul transmission systems and thus will induce large cost and huge energy consumption. So, the power and cost efficiency should be the key consideration for SR-ONs besides the transmission performance. To improve the power and cost efficiency in SR-ONs, advanced modulations and detection techniques based on low power, low cost and integrated optical modulators should be utilized. In this paper, different advanced modulation formats have been discussed. 56Gbps PAM4, 112Gbps poly-binary and 100Gbps DMT that can be used to realize 400-Gbps SR-ONs for different applications have also been demonstrated respectively. In addition, low-cost and low-power opto-electronic components suitable for SR-ONs, the impairments induced by all kinds of defects and bandwidth limitation of opto-electronic components and the corresponding compensation techniques based on DSP algorithms have also been discussed in the experiments.

Advanced modulation formats for 400-Gbps short-reach optical inter-connection

We present an O-band 400 Gbit/s optical client side Ethernet link with 40 km SSMF reach employing four LAN-WDM lanes, MultiCAP modulation and direct detection.

O-band 400 Gbit/s client side optical transmission link

This paper proposes a new scheme using single N×N cyclic AWG and fast tunable lasers to realize a high-radix kN×kN optical burst switch, which is cost-effective compared with kN×kN AWG and cascaded N×N AWGs schemes.

A cost-effective scheme of high-radix optical burst switch based on fast tunable lasers and cyclic AWG

A multi-granularity optical burst switch fabric with 80M×80M(M=2, 4, 8…) ports using Fast Tunable Lasers and ULCF-AWG is proposed. This fabric for Petabits/s multi-chassis switches and routers is also experimentally demonstrated.

Qiwen Zhong

Papers

Multiband Carrierless Amplitude Phase Modulation for High Capacity Optical Data Links

Advanced modulation formats for 400-Gbps short-reach optical inter-connection

O-band 400 Gbit/s client side optical transmission link

A cost-effective scheme of high-radix optical burst switch based on fast tunable lasers and cyclic AWG

An optical burst switching fabric of multi-granularity for Petabits/s multi-chassis switches and routers