Evaluation of Proposed Coherent Optical OFDM Link Using X-QAM with Polarization Division Multiplexing

Abstract

Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is one of the popular techniques used for 4 G, 5 G and backbone optical communication networks to meet the large data transfer requirement applications. Optical Communication model based on Coherent Optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) using 4-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM), 16-QAM and 64-QAM has been evaluated by different researchers. To understand and evaluate the effects of polarization, we have proposed an Optical Communication model with Polarization Division Multiplexing (PDM). The proposed CO-OFDM PDM system has been evaluated for different link lengths of 50, 100 and 150 km at varying data rates of 10, 20 and 30 Gbps. The performance of the designed link has been evaluated in terms of Q-factor, Bit Error Rate (BER), Optical Spectrum and constellation diagram. The results clearly exhibit that the Q-factor, BER and constellations are superior when PDM is incorporated with the CO-OFDM link using X-QAM.