Transmission of a 213.

7-Gb/s Single-Polarization Direct-

Detection Optical OFDM Superchannel over 720-km Standard
Single Mode Fiber with EDFA-only Amplification
Wei-Ren Peng, Hidenori Takahashi, Itsuro Morita, and Hideaki Tanaka

KDDI R&D Laboratories, Inc.
2-1-15 Ohara, Fujimino, Saitama 356-8502, Japan. Email: xwe-peng@tsm.kddilabs.jp

Abstract We propose and demonstrate the optical multiband receiving method which supports
transmission of a 16-QAM, 213.7-Gb/s (189.7-Gb/s) DDO-OFDM super-channel over 720-km SSMF.
After transmission all the 9 OFDM bands exhibit BERs lower than the FEC threshold (BER = 3.8e-3).
Introduction
By virtue of the high-speed digital signal
processor (DSP), diverse transmission
techniques in wireless regime have broadly
been investigated for fibre-optic transmissions to
explore any potential possibility extending the
links capacity and reach product. One
promising candidate of these techniques is the
optical OFDM (O-OFDM) which exhibits a well-
defined optical spectrum making the ultra-small
channel spacing possible [1-3]. Being called the
supper-channel, multiple OFDM bands are
closely allocated with a guard band of < 1 GHz,
which enables a spectral efficiency (SE) of as
high as 7 bit/s/Hz [3,4]. However, the OFDM
super-channels demonstrated so far are all
based on the coherent transmission technique
(CO-OFDM), which usually requires more
components at the receiver, ex. optical hybrids
and local oscillators, to capture the complex
amplitude of the received signal, thus leading to
a high-cost front end of the receiver.
One direct solution to the costly receiving in
CO-OFDM is to send the carrier with the super-
channel at the transmitter for remote beating, i.e.
direct-detection optical OFDM (DDO-OFDM) [5],
which typically utilizes only one photodiode in
the receiver. However, the receivers electrical
bandwidth (which should support at least the
frequency gap and the whole super-channel
bandwidth) will limit the capacity of per super-
channel because each band in the super-
channel should be extracted by the heterodyne
beating between the transmitted carrier and
sideband. Besides, the conventional DDO-
OFDM would require the frequency gap width to
be equal to the super-channel bandwidth,
therefore sacrificing ~half the transmitted
bandwidth. Hence, a laudable solution to carry
the direct-detection OFDM super-channel would
be to 1) relax the required bandwidth of receiver
in order to get the higher capacity per super-
channel, and 2) offer a gap-reduction approach
which increase the frequency utilizing efficiency.
In this paper, for DDO-OFDM super-channel
we propose the dual-carrier (in the same
polarization and on both sides of the super-
channel) transmission technique to relax the
receivers bandwidth and the optical multiband
receiving technique (one band detection per
branch) to reduce the frequency gap width. We
successfully demonstrate the transmission of a
single-polarization 213.7-Gb/s (189.7-Gb/s
without overhead) DDO-OFDM super-channel,
including 9 bands and two carriers with a 80-
GHz bandwidth, over 720-km standard single
mode fibre (SSMF) with all bands BER lower
than the FEC threshold (3.8e-3) [6].
Working Principle and Experimental Setup
The proposed dual-carrier assisted DDO-
OFDM super-channel is depicted in Fig.1(a).
The two carriers are allocated at both sides of
the super-channel in the same polarization, and
each carrier is in charge of detecting the signal
band which is spectrally closer to itself, i.e.
carrier 1 will be responsible for band #1 to N/2,
and carrier 2 will be in charge of band # (N/2+1)
to N. With this carrier arrangement, the
receivers bandwidth could be relaxed by a
factor of 2. The optical multiband receiving is
depicted in Fig. 1(b). The super-channel is
demodulated in a band-by-band manner via a
bank of the double-pass-band filters (DPF), of
which the two pass-bands are targeting at the
desired signal band and the carrier. Since only
one band with the carrier is sent to the
photodiode, the beat interference will have an
relatively narrow bandwidth and will not affect
the desired signal band as long as the gap width

Fig. 1: (a) Direct-detection optical OFDM super-
channel and (b) optical multiband receiving.

Fig. 2: Experimental setup for the DDO-OFDM superchannel over 720-km SSMF transmission. Optical Spectra of
(100-MHz resolution) (a) Single-band OFDM, (b) 3-band OFDM, (c) 9-band OFDM, (d) double carriers after inter-
leaver (IL), (e) output super-channel, (f) after the double-passband filter (DPF). TL: tuneable laser.

is smaller than the bandwidth of one signal band,
therefore greatly reliving the gap width
requirement compared with the conventional
DDO-OFDM system.
In Fig. 2 we depict the experimental setup for
the proposed system. A 100-kHz linewidth
tuneable laser (TL) operated at 192.76 THz is
used as the transmitter light source followed by
a 1x2 optical splitter which equally couples the
laser output light into the upper sideband path
and lower carrier path. In the sideband path, the
light signal is firstly modulated with the electrical
OFDM signal via an in-phase/quadrature-phase
(I/Q) modulator. The OFDM signal is generated
offline with Matlab and composed of frames with
each containing 2 training symbols and 150 data
symbols. For each OFDM symbol, the binary
data is randomly generated and modulated onto
152 subcarriers with 16 QAM format, which later
zero-padded to a fast Fourier transform (FFT)
size of 256. No pilot is utilized in this
demonstration. After Inverse FFT (IFFT), a
length of 10-point cyclic prefix (CP) is added to
each OFDM symbol, leading to 266 points per
symbol. The OFDM waveform is then loaded
into an arbitrary waveform generator which has
its real and imaginary outputs driving the IQ
modulator with a 10 GS/s sampling rate. Hence,
the raw data rate of the output signal is ~23.75
Gb/s occupying an overall bandwidth of ~6 GHz.
After the I/Q modulator, this signal band is sent
to a 9-comb generator, which consists of two
cascaded MZMs operated at their maximum
points, to emulate a 9-band super-channel. The
channel spacing is set at 6.5 GHz and the total
data rate and bandwidth of this super-channel is
213.7 Gb/s and 58 GHz, respectively. After
removing the training, CP and FEC overhead,
this super-channel carries a net data rate of
189.7 Gb/s. An optical coupler is followed to
combine this super-channel and the signal from
the lower path. The optical spectra of different
signal bands can be observed in Fig. 2(a)-(c).
As to the carrier path, the light is firstly
modulated with a 40-GHz electrical sine-wave
signal with one MZM biased at the null and
passes through a 50:100-GHz inter-leaver (IL) to
suppress the original optical carrier. The two
newly-generated carriers, spaced with a
frequency of 80 GHz (Fig. 2(d)), are combined
with the super-channel, resulting in the spectrum
shown in Fig. 2(e). This carrier-assisted super-
channel is sent to an re-circulating fibre loop,
which consists of three EDFA and three spools
of 80-km SSMF, and enters the proposed multi-
band receiver. At the receiver, the signal is pre-
amplified with an EDFA and then passes
through a tuneable DPF, which has two 10-GHz
pass-bands targeting at one of the optical
carriers and one of the signal bands. Due to the
inherent loss of DPF, an EDFA and an 80-GHz
optical band-pass filter (OBPF) are necessary to
raise the signal power before the signal entering
the photodiode. The electrical signal is further
down-converted to its baseband with an I/Q
demodulator, which consists of two broadband
double-balanced mixers. The I/Q baseband
signals are injected through one pair of low pass
filters (LPFs) with a 3-dB bandwidth of 3.7 GHz
and are recorded by a real time scope operated
at 20 GS/s. Synchronization, cyclic prefix
removal, channel estimation and equalization
(including I/Q balance compensation [7] with the
intra-symbol frequency domain average
approach [8]) are conducted offline with Matlab
program. The BER is evaluated with error
counting method and for each BER 2 million
sampling points are considered.
Results and Discussions
Since the carrier performs the main role of
data demodulation, the carrier to noise ratio
should be kept as high as possible at the
receiver so that the received electrical SNR
could be limited only by the super-channel's
OSNR. Hence, for reaching 720-km SSMF
transmission, we adopt a new strategy that uses
Fig. 3: Measured Q factor versus the launch power
for the edged and central bands.

a high power ratio of ~12 dB between the
carriers and the 9-band super-channel for
maintaining the carriers quality. After the
DPF,the filtered single band, having a power of
~1/9 of the whole super-channel power, would
be ~18.5 dB lower than the filtered carrier,
therefore making such a receiving behaviour
more like a coherent receiving.
In experiments, the OSNR of the super-
channel before and after 720 km transmission is
found to be ~31 and ~21.3 dB (in 0.1 nm
resolution), respectively, and the super-channel
bands from 1 to 4 are down-converted with
carrier 1 and the bands from 5 to 9 are with
carrier 2. The band numbers are defined in the
inset of Fig. 3.
In Fig. 3 we show the measured Q factor,
evaluated from the BER, as a function of the
fibre launch power with the edged (1st and 9th)
and central (5th) bands after 720-km
transmission. The optimum power is found to be
~8 dBm, which yields the best performance
under the linear noise and nonlinear fibre
distortion limitations. Note that even though the
found optimum power is as high as ~8 dBm, due
to the 12-dB carrier/sideband power ratio, the
superchannels launch power is only 4 dBm.
Fig. 4(a) shows the results of measured Q
factor versus band index. In the case of back to
back, the 5th band shows the worst
performance caused by the insufficient
bandwidth of the receiver's components; while
the other 8 bands exhibit Q factors higher than
12 dB. After 720-km transmission, the worst
performance happens on the 1st band, which
still yields a Q factor higher than the 7% FEC
threshold of 8.53 dB [2]. After transmission, the
performance differences among the signal
bands are reduced because it turns to be the
noise and distortion that dominant the
performance instead of the receiver's bandwidth.
Fig. 4(b) depicts the measured Q factor versus
the SSMF length with the edged and central
bands. This clearly indicates that the
demonstrated system could reach ~600 and 720
km, respectively, with the BER thresholds of
2.3e-3 [3] and 3.8e-3 [6], which correspond to
two different kinds of 7% FEC coding schemes.
(a)
(b)
Fig. 4: (a) Measured Q factor versus band index with
0 km and 720 km transmission. (b) Measured Q
factor versus the transmission distance with the
edged and central bands.
Conclusions
We have successfully demonstrated the
transmission of a 16-QAM, 213.7Gb/s
(189.7Gb/s without overhead) direct-detection
optical OFDM super-channel over 720-km
SSMF with a newly-proposed optical multiband
receiving technique.
Acknowledgement
This work was partly supported by National
Institute of Information and Communications
Technology (NICT) of Japan.
References
1 Q. Yang et al., OFC'08, PDP7 (2008).
2 X. Liu et al., OFC'10, PDPC2 (2010).
3 H. Takahashi et al., OFC'09, PDPB7 (2009).
4 H. Takahashi et al., ECOC'10, Tu3C1 (2010).
5 B. Schmidt et al., OFC'09, PDPC3 (2009).
6 ITU-T Recommendation G.975.1, Appendix I.9
(2004)
7 W.R Peng et al., PTL 21, 103 (2009).
8 X. Liu et al., Opt Express 16, 21944 (2008).