Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a modulation technique which is now used in most new and emerging broadband wired and wireless communication systems because it is an effective solution to intersymbol interference caused by a dispersive channel. Very recently a number of researchers have shown that OFDM is also a promising technology for optical communications. This paper gives a tutorial overview of OFDM highlighting the aspects that are likely to be important in optical applications. To achieve good performance in optical systems OFDM must be adapted in various ways. The constraints imposed by single mode optical fiber, multimode optical fiber and optical wireless are discussed and the new forms of optical OFDM which have been developed are outlined. The main drawbacks of OFDM are its high peak to average power ratio and its sensitivity to phase noise and frequency offset. The impairments that these cause are described and their implications for optical systems discussed.

OFDM for Optical Communications

The drive for higher performance in optical fiber systems has renewed interest in coherent detection. We review detection methods, including noncoherent, differentially coherent, and coherent detection, as well as a hybrid method. We compare modulation methods encoding information in various degrees of freedom (DOF). Polarization-multiplexed quadrature-amplitude modulation maximizes spectral efficiency and power efficiency, by utilizing all four available DOF, the two field quadratures in the two polarizations. Dual-polarization homodyne or heterodyne downconversion are linear processes that can fully recover the received signal field in these four DOF. When downconverted signals are sampled at the Nyquist rate, compensation of transmission impairments can be performed using digital signal processing (DSP). Linear impairments, including chromatic dispersion and polarization-mode dispersion, can be compensated quasi-exactly using finite impulse response filters. Some nonlinear impairments, such as intra-channel four-wave mixing and nonlinear phase noise, can be compensated partially. Carrier phase recovery can be performed using feedforward methods, even when phase-locked loops may fail due to delay constraints. DSP-based compensation enables a receiver to adapt to time-varying impairments, and facilitates use of advanced forward-error-correction codes. We discuss both single- and multi-carrier system implementations. For a given modulation format, using coherent detection, they offer fundamentally the same spectral efficiency and power efficiency, but may differ in practice, because of different impairments and implementation details. With anticipated advances in analog-to-digital converters and integrated circuit technology, DSP-based coherent receivers at bit rates up to 100 Gbit/s should become practical within the next few years.

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Coherent detection in optical fiber systems

The rigid nature of current wavelength-routed optical networks brings limitations on network utilization efficiency. One limitation originates from mismatch of granularities between the client layer and the wavelength layer. The recently proposed spectrum-sliced elastic optical path network (SLICE) is expected to mitigate this problem by adaptively allocating spectral resources according to client traffic demands. This article discusses another limitation of the current optical networks associated with worst case design in terms of transmission performance. In order to address this problem, we present a concept of a novel adaptation scheme in SLICE called distance-adaptive spectrum resource allocation. In the presented scheme the minimum necessary spectral resource is adaptively allocated according to the end-to-end physical condition of an optical path. Modulation format and optical filter width are used as parameters to determine the necessary spectral resources to be allocated for an optical path. Evaluation of network utilization efficiency shows that distance-adaptive SLICE can save more than 45 percent of required spectrum resources for a 12-node ring network. Finally, we introduce the concept of a frequency slot to extend the current frequency grid standard, and discuss possible spectral resource designation schemes.

Distance-adaptive spectrum resource allocation in spectrum-sliced elastic optical path network [Topics in Optical Communications]

Digital coherent receivers have caused a revolution in the design of optical transmission systems, due to the subsystems and algorithms embedded within such a receiver. After giving a high-level overview of the subsystems, the optical front end, the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and the digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms, which relax the tolerances on these subsystems are discussed. Attention is then turned to the compensation of transmission impairments, both static and dynamic. The discussion of dynamic-channel equalization, which forms a significant part of the paper, includes a theoretical analysis of the dual-polarization constant modulus algorithm, where the control surfaces several different equalizer algorithms are derived, including the constant modulus, decision-directed, trained, and the radially directed equalizer for both polarization division multiplexed quadriphase shift keyed (PDM-QPSK) and 16 level quadrature amplitude modulation (PDM-16-QAM). Synchronization algorithms employed to recover the timing and carrier phase information are then examined, after which the data may be recovered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges for future coherent optical transmission systems.

Digital Coherent Optical Receivers: Algorithms and Subsystems

Coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) has recently been proposed and the proof-of-concept transmission experiments have shown its extreme robustness against chromatic dispersion and polarization mode dispersion. In this paper, we first review the theoretical fundamentals for CO-OFDM and its channel model in a 2x2 MIMO-OFDM representation. We then present various design choices for CO-OFDM systems and perform the nonlinearity analysis for RF-to-optical up-converter. We also show the receiver-based digital signal processing to mitigate self-phase-modulation (SPM) and Gordon-Mollenauer phase noise, which is equivalent to the midspan phase conjugation.

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Coherent optical OFDM: theory and design.

Coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) has emerged as an attractive modulation format for the forthcoming 100 Gb/s Ethernet. However, even the spectral-efficient implementation of CO-OFDM requires digital-to-analog converters (DAC) and analog-to-digital converters (ADC) to operate at the bandwidth which may not be available today or may not be cost-effective. In order to resolve the electronic bandwidth bottleneck associated with DAC/ADC devices, we propose and elucidate the principle of orthogonal-band-multiplexed OFDM (OBM-OFDM) to subdivide the entire OFDM spectrum into multiple orthogonal bands. With this scheme, the DAC/ADCs do not need to operate at extremely high sampling rate. The corresponding mapping to the mixed-signal integrated circuit (IC) design is also revealed. Additionally, we show the proof-of-concept transmission experiment through optical realization of OBM-OFDM. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first experimental demonstration of 107 Gb/s QPSK-encoded CO-OFDM signal transmission over 1000 km standard-single- mode-fiber (SSMF) without optical dispersion compensation and without Raman amplification. The demonstrated system employs 2x2 MIMO-OFDM signal processing and achieves high electrical spectral efficiency with direct-conversion at both transmitter and receiver.

107 Gb/s coherent optical OFDM transmission over 1000-km SSMF fiber using orthogonal band multiplexing

A 1-Tb/s single-channel coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) signal consisting of continuous 4,104 spectrally-overlapped subcarriers is generated using a novel device of recirculating frequency shifter (RFS) The RFS produces 3206-GHz wide spectrum using a single laser with superior flatness and tone-to-noise ratio (TNR) The 1-Tb/s CO-OFDM signal is comprised of 36 uncorrelated orthogonal bands achieved by adjusting the delay of the RFS to an integer number of OFDM symbol periods The 1- Tb/s CO-OFDM signal with a spectral efficiency of 33 bit/s/Hz is successfully received after transmission over 600-km SSMF fiber without either Raman amplification or dispersion compensation

1-Tb/s single-channel coherent optical OFDM transmission over 600-km SSMF fiber with subwavelength bandwidth access.

There has been growing interest in coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) We aim to present the case that the time for CO-OFDM has come, in terms of the demand from today's ever-advancing optical networks and the availability of its underlying technologies We first lay out the signal processing aspect for CO-OFDM and then show a 2×2 multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) OFDM representation for the single-mode fiber optical channel Through numerical simulation and experimental demonstration, we further present and discuss various MIMO-OFDM systems focusing on their polarization-mode dispersion resilience Among those systems, the 2×1 MIMO-OFDM configuration incorporating polarization-time coding shows promise for optical access networks and broadcast networks Finally, another class of the frequency-domain equalization techniques, namely, incoherent or coherent optical single-carrier frequency-domain equalization (CO-SCFDE) is discussed and experimentally demonstrated

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Coherent optical OFDM: has its time come? [Invited]

There are three major advantages for coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) transmission using digital signal processing. First, coherent detection is realized by digital phase estimation without the need for optical phase-locked loop. Second, OFDM modulation and demodulation are realized by the well-established computation-efficient fast Fourier transform (FFT) and inverse FFT. Third, adaptive data rates can be supported as different quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) constellations are software-defined, without any hardware change in transmitter and receiver. However, it is well-known that coherent detection, OFDM, and QAM are all susceptible to phase noise. In this paper, theoretical, numerical, and experimental investigations are carried out for phase noise effects on high spectral efficiency CO-OFDM transmission. A transmission model in the presence of phase noise is presented. By using simulation, the bit error rate floors from finite laser linewidth are presented for CO-OFDM systems with high-order QAM constellations. In the experiments, the phase noise effects from both laser linewidth and nonlinear fiber transmission are investigated. The fiber nonlinearity mitigation based on receiver digital signal processing is also discussed.

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Phase Noise Effects on High Spectral Efficiency Coherent Optical OFDM Transmission

In this paper, we conduct theoretical and experimental study on the PMD-supported transmission with coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM). We first present the model for the optical fiber communication channel in the presence of the polarization effects. It shows that the optical fiber channel model can be treated as a special kind of multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) model, namely, a two-input two-output (TITO) model which is intrinsically represented by a two-element Jones vector familiar to the optical communications community. The detailed discussions on various coherent optical MIMO-OFDM (CO-MIMO-OFDM) models are presented. Furthermore, we show the first experiment of polarization-diversity detection in CO-OFDM systems. In particular, a CO-OFDM signal at 10.7 Gb/s is successfully recovered after 900 ps differential-group-delay (DGD) and 1000-km transmission through SSMF fiber without optical dispersion compensation. The transmission experiment with higher-order PMD further confirms the immunity of the CO-OFDM signal to PMD in the transmission fiber. The nonlinearity performance of PMD-supported transmission is also reported. For the first time, nonlinear phase noise mitigation based on receiver digital signal processing is experimentally demonstrated for CO-OFDM transmission.

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Yiran Ma

Papers

107 Gb/s coherent optical OFDM transmission over 1000-km SSMF fiber using orthogonal band multiplexing

1-Tb/s single-channel coherent optical OFDM transmission over 600-km SSMF fiber with subwavelength bandwidth access.

Coherent optical OFDM: has its time come? [Invited]

Phase Noise Effects on High Spectral Efficiency Coherent Optical OFDM Transmission

Theoretical and experimental study on PMD-supported transmission using polarization diversity in coherent optical OFDM systems.