I/Q Channel Separated Baseband OFDM Optical Transmission Using Orthogonal Polarizations in IM/DD System

Abstract

We have proposed baseband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) optical transmission technique using I/Q channel separation based on dual polarization with intensity modulation/direct detection (IM/DD). We experimentally verified performance of a proposed system in compare with intermediate frequency (IF)-upconverted OFDM system. In order to obtain better performance, adaptively modulated optical OFDM signal was used in this study. As a result, experimentally achieved maximum throughput after 50 km single mode fiber transmission was 28 Gbps with only using 4 GHz signal bandwidth. The proposed technique has relatively simple hardware structure and reduces computational complexity compared to other methods (IF upconversion or Hermitian symmetry) in IM/DD-based polarization multiplexed OFDM system.