Orthogonal Circulant Multiplexing for Bandwidth- Limited Direct-Detected Optical Communication Systems

Abstract

We propose and investigate a novel orthogonal circulant multiplexing (OCM) technology for bandwidth-limited direct detection (DD) optical systems. We analytically derive that any OCM, i.e. using any orthogonal circulant matrix for multiplexing, can redistribute the noise uniformly across the subcarriers. However, the distribution of inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-carrier interference (ICI) strongly depends on the design of OCM. The previously proposed orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM), although showing better ISI/ICI tolerance than discrete-Fourier-transform spread (DFT-S) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), is a kind of OCM with poorer performance. We propose and analytically reveal that OCM based on chirp-like polyphase sequence (CLPS), general chirp sequence (GCS), sparse CLPS (SCLPS), and sparse GCS (SGCS) can achieve flatter ISI/ICI distribution across subcarriers and so better performance than OCDM in bandwidth-limited DD systems. The optimal parameter vector of the E-parameter CLPS is a Zadoff-Chu sequence while the parameter α in GCS should be larger. The optimal performance can be achieved by either CLPS (or GCS) using a larger E (or α) or SCLPS (or SGCS) with optimized sparsity. ∼110Gbit/s experiments using Mach-Zehnder modulator or electro-absorption modulator and receiver of 10-GHz photodiode or 8-GHz avalanche photodiode are conducted. The results agree with the theory and show that the proposed OCM outperforms conventional OFDM, DFT-S OFDM, and OCDM.