Experimental demonstration of Layered/Enhanced ACO-OFDM in short haul optical fiber transmission link

TL;DR

This paper experimentally demonstrates that Layered/Enhanced ACO-OFDM can achieve higher spectral efficiency and improved Q-factors over DCO-OFDM in a 30-km optical fiber link at 4.375 Gbps.

Contribution

The paper provides the first experimental validation of L/E-ACO-OFDM's advantages in long-distance optical fiber transmission.

Findings

L/E-ACO-OFDM achieves 2-dB Q-factor improvement over DCO-OFDM in back-to-back tests.

L/E-ACO-OFDM achieves 1.5-dB Q-factor improvement after 30 km fiber transmission.

Successful demonstration of 4.375 Gbps data rate over 30 km fiber using L/E-ACO-OFDM.

Abstract

Asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (ACO-OFDM) is theoretically more power efficient but less spectrally efficient than DC-bias OFDM (DCO-OFDM), with less power allocating to the informationless bias component by only using odd index sub-carriers. Layered/Enhanced asymmetrically clipped optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (L/E-ACO-OFDM) has been proposed to increase the spectral efficiency of ACO-OFDM. In this letter, we experimentally demonstrate a 30-km single mode fiber transmission using L/E-ACO-OFDM at 4.375 Gbits/s. Using a Volterra filter based equalizer, 2-dB and 1.5-dB Q-factor improvements for L/E-ACO-OFDM comparing with DCO-OFDM can be obtained in back-to-back and 30-km fiber transmission respectively.