Demonstration of 2 × ONU 80 Gbps direct detection colorless polarization division multiplexing frequency division multiplexing passive optical network uplink transmission

Abstract

In this study, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a simple direct detection passive optical network (PON) uplink transmission scheme based on frequency division multiplexing and polarization division multiplexing. Two optical network units (ONUs) are assigned to two different frequency bands at two different orthogonal polarization directions. At the optical line terminal, both ONU signals can be simultaneously detected by a single photodiode without utilizing any polarization control, polarization selection, or complicated polarization demultiplexing algorithms. As a proof-of-concept, the 2×ONU 80 Gbps 32-ary quadrature amplitude modulation Nyquist single carrier signals are successfully transmitted over 2 km standard single mode fiber or 20 km large effective area fiber with the assistance of frequency domain equalization and decision-directed least-mean-square. The measured bit error rate can be below the 7% pre-forward error correction threshold of 3.8×10−3. Meanwhile, this scheme is compatible with the widely used wavelength-division multiplexed PON, which shows the promising potential and feasibility of this proposal.