1.6 Tbit/s OFDM WDM-PON system employing RSOA as a colorless transmitter

Abstract

In this paper, we have evaluated a bidirectional Wavelength Division Multiplexing Passive Optical Network (WDM-PON) employing Intensity Modulated/Direct Detection Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (IM/DD-OFDM). The proposed system employs 100 Gbps 16 Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (16-QAM) downstream and 5 Gbps On-Off keying (OOK) upstream wavelengths, respectively. The proposed system is considered low-cost as non-coherent IM/DD OFDM technology and a simple Reflective Semiconductor Optical Amplifier (RSOA) colorless transmitter are employed and no Dispersion Compensating Fiber (DCF) is needed. Based on the BER results of WDM signals, the proposed WDM-PON system can achieve up to 1.6 Tbit/s (100 Gbit/s/λ × 16 wavelengths) downstream transmission over a 30 km single mode fiber (SMF).