Experimental investigations in transmission performance of real-time long-reach adaptively modulated direct-detection optical-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing systems

Abstract

A real-time base-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transceiver with symbol synchronization, channel equalization, sampling clock frequency synchronization, and adaptive modulation technique is successfully implemented by field programmable gate arrays and a 2.5-GSps digital-to-analog converter and analog-to-digital converter. The real-time optical OFDM signal at a raw bit rate of 5.156 Gbps within about 1.1-GHz bandwidth transmission over 100-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) is experimentally investigated in a simple intensity-modulation and direct-detection system. The experimental results show that the real-time system has a good bit error rate (BER) performance by using an adaptive modulation technique according to the conditions on the subchannels. After 100-km SSMF transmission, at a BER of 1×10−3, the power penalty is <1 dB. Moreover, there is a negligible penalty between the off-line and real-time digital signal processing results.