Electrical and optical clock and data recovery in optical access networks: a comparative study

Abstract

Clock and data recovery (CDR) is an essential part in high-speed telecommunication systems. The CDR is used to extract the clock and re-time the received data, which allows a synchronous operation to recover the transmitted signal. In optical access networks, electrical CDR or optical CDR implementations can be used. However, there are no clear guidelines or recommendations on which CDR implementation should be adopted for better performance. These missing clear recommendations are because the electrical CDR requires electronics design expertise whereas the optical CDR requires optical design expertise. Consequently, in this paper, an all-digital CDR, designed and implemented on the field-programmable gate array platform, and an optical CDR, developed by using fiber Bragg grating technology on the OptiSystem platform, are presented. Furthermore, the integration of these 2 CDR implementations with the optical access network is implemented, and their performance is evaluated for various transmission rates and communication distances. Finally, a comparative study in terms of the bit error rate between the all-digital CDR and the optical CDR is presented. KEYWORDSclock and data recovery, fiber Bragg grating, field-programmable gate array, optical access network 1 Int. J. Commun. Syst. 2016; 29: 2555-2564 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/dac