Signal-carrier interleaved optical OFDM for

direct detection optical communication

Xi Chen,
*
Di Che, An Li, Jiayuan He, and William Shieh
Dept. of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia
*
xc@unimelb.edu.au
Abstract: We propose signal-carrier interleaved (SCI) optical OFDM for
direct detected transmission systems. Such a scheme can be considered as a
variation of self-coherent detection where the carrier and signal are supplied
at the transmitter and extracted at the receiver for coherent-like detection.
This provides high OSNR sensitivity while maintaining very low carrier-to-
signal power ratio (CSR). Our experiment results show that with 0 dB CSR,
43.2 Gb/s 16 QAM OFDM signal can be successfully delivered over 80 km
standard single mode fiber (SSMF) with 24 dB OSNR requirements at 7%
FEC limit.
2013 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (060.2330) Fiber optics communications; (060.4080) Modulation.
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#194237 - $15.00 USD Received 22 Jul 2013; revised 3 Oct 2013; accepted 6 Oct 2013; published 23 Dec 2013
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1. Introduction
Direct-modulation (DM) and direct detection (DD) based optical communication systems
have continued to attract attentions because of its low cost and simple implementation.
Despite the fact that coherent detection has achieved dramatic success in the past few years
due to adoption of powerful electronic digital signal processing [14], the optical gears for
coherent detection are rather sophisticated, requiring polarization multiplexing/de-
multiplexing, double IQ modulators and balanced receivers. Subsequently, for cost-sensitive
short-reach high-speed communication, such as inter-cabinet communication, DM/DD is a
more desirable option and has been actively explored [515]. One of the common DD
schemes studied in the last a few years is the offset single sideband (SSB) [8]. By leaving a
gap between signal and the main carrier, the signal can be free from signal-to-signal beat
noise (SSBN). Another technique to avoid interference from SSBN is to utilize subcarrier
interleaved configuration where only odd number subcarriers are filled [13]. Furthermore, by
adopting SSB modulation, the signals are immune to dispersion induced fading. Although the
performance of offset SSB or subcarrier interleaved direct detected signals is relatively
superior, such configuration sacrifices electrical bandwidth and thus has relatively low
electrical spectral efficiency (SE). To improve the SE of DD systems, Peng et al. have
proposed a virtual SSB DD (VSSB-DD) scheme in which advanced digital signal processing
(DSP) is employed to cancel SSBN [14]. In this way, the guard band between the main carrier
and the signal is not required, and electrical SE is doubled. Recently, block-wise phase
switching (BPS) DD is proposed to improve electrical SE by using double sideband (DSB)
modulation [15]. However, there are two drawbacks for either VSSB-DD or BPS-DD: (i) in
order to remove SSBN, high carrier-to-signal power ratio (CSR) is required, and (ii)
complicated DSP is involved for iterative SSBN cancellation.
In this paper, we propose signal-carrier interleaved optical OFDM (SCI-OOFDM) for
direct detected optical communication systems. The SCI-OOFDM signals assign the main
carrier and the signals to different time slots, for instance, to different OFDM symbols. At the
receiver, optical hybrid and differential detection are utilized to recover the double sideband
signals. In this way, as long as balanced receiver provides high enough common mode
rejection ratio (CMRR, defined as the ratio between the differential-mode gain and the
common-mode gain inside a balanced receiver), SSBN cancellation in DSP is not needed.
SCI-OOFDM possesses the following advantages: (i) it gains significant sensitivity
improvement over BPS-OFDM or VSSB-OFDM, (ii) the DSP procedure for SCI-OOFDM
can be as simple as offset OFDM, (iii) the system does not require any filtering at the receiver
side to pick up the main carrier, thus the frequency tracking of the main carrier is not needed
as well. Furthermore, since SCI-OOFDM signals can be DSB modulated, the SE of such
system is twice as that of offset SSB OFDM. Note that the SCI-OOFDM approach we
proposed is essentially one variation of self-coherent scheme [16], but with much longer
optical delay at receiver, our signals are robust against chromatic dispersion. Furthermore,
comparing with conventional self-coherent detection, in SCI direct detection (SCI-DD)
#194237 - $15.00 USD Received 22 Jul 2013; revised 3 Oct 2013; accepted 6 Oct 2013; published 23 Dec 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 30 December 2013 | Vol. 21, No. 26 | DOI:10.1364/OE.21.032501 | OPTICS EXPRESS 32502
scheme the received electrical signal bandwidth will not be doubled as the CW main carrier
(rather than signal itself) is mixing with the signals.
2. Principle of signal-carrier interleaved direct detection
The idea of SCI-DD is to interleave signals with the main carrier on block basis. The block
here refers to one (or a few) OFDM symbol(s). In single-carrier modulation format, the
block can be a certain length of signal waveform. At the receiver, the signal is split into two
paths, with one of the paths delayed by one block against the other. These two paths are then
fed into a coherent receiver consisting of an optical hybrid and two balanced receivers to
recover the DSB complex signal.
The structure of SCI signals and structure of SCI-DD receiver are shown Fig. 1. The
delayed path at receiver is also depicted for comparison. There can be a few different
variations when complementing the SCI-DD. Figure 1(a) illustrates the most straightforward
implementation of SCI-DD, where every signal block
s
E is followed by a main carrier block
0
E . Therefore, in Fig. 1(a), the same signal either in the pink shaded block (shaded area with
dashed outer line) or the blue shaded block (shaded area with solid outer line) can be
recovered. This means the overall SE is reduced by a factor of 2, since half of the waveform
is allocated for the main carrier in the time domain. To achieve better SE, an optimized
scheme is illustrated in Fig. 1(b), where every two signal blocks are followed by one main
carrier block. Hence, at the receiver, as shown in the figure, 2/3 of the waveform (pink shaded
areas) can be recovered. This version of 2/3 SE is the optimal SE we can achieve for our
proposed SCI-DD scheme. This is because using either shorter signal blocks to interleave
with carrier block would reduce the overall SE, and using longer blocks would result in
increased computational complexity, the very problem we try to avoid in this report.
After the original received signal and the delayed signal pass through an optical hybrid,
the output of the hybrid are shown in Fig. 1(c). Since the delay time is designed to be exactly
one block, in each given time frame, there is a carrier beating with the signal. Namely, from
the first pair of the hybrid outputs, we can recover the real part of the signal, and from the
second pair we recover the imaginary part. The photocurrent
1
I and
2
I at the output of two
balanced receivers would respectively be the following

{ } { }
* *
1 0 2 0
4Re 4Im
s s
I E E I E E = = (1)
where
s
E represents a signal block, and
0
E stands for a carrier block. The superscript * means
complex conjugate.
Since the signals are recovered without SSBN compensation, the DSP of SCI-OOFDM
can be as computationally efficient as offset OFDM. The procedure of the receiver DSP is the
same of single-polarization coherent optical OFDM [17]: (i) IQ imbalance compensation,
(ii) FFT window synchronization for identifying the start of the OFDM symbol, (iii) CP
removal and Fast Fourier transform (iv) phase noise compensation, (v) channel estimation in
terms of Jones Matrix H , and (vi) constellation construction for each carrier and bit error
rate (BER) computation. Note that the above DSP procedure are applicable to both the
1/2 SE version shown in Fig. 1 (a) and the 2/3 SE version shown in Fig. 1 (b), and as such
the DSP complexity for different variations with different SE is similar.
The SCI-DD scheme is essentially a variation of self-coherent detection where the carrier
and signal are supplied at the transmitter, extracted at the receiver for coherent-like detection
[16,18]. Comparing with previously proposed digital self-coherent detection (DSCD) scheme
[16], the advantage of our SCI-DD approach is twofold. First, since long optical delay (10 ns
or longer) is utilized for SCI-DD, the signals is resilient to fiber dispersion. Second, the
mixing products generated at receiver are between the main carrier and the signals, signifying
that the signal bandwidth after DD will not be doubled as for conventional DSCD.
#194237 - $15.00 USD Received 22 Jul 2013; revised 3 Oct 2013; accepted 6 Oct 2013; published 23 Dec 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 30 December 2013 | Vol. 21, No. 26 | DOI:10.1364/OE.21.032501 | OPTICS EXPRESS 32503
Meanwhile, comparing with the other self-coherent approach in [18], SCI-DD does not
require a sharp optical filter to extract the main carrier and thus does not need to acquire and
active tracking the main carrier at the receiver.
(b)
t
E
s1
E
0
E
s1

E
s2
E
s1
E
0
E
0

E
s2
Signal
Delayed
signal
(a)
E
0
E
s
E
0

Signal
t
E
s
E
0
E
s

Delayed
signal
(c)
BR
Re(E
s
E
0
*)
Im(E
s
E
0
*)
Optical
Hybrid
Power Splitter
Rx
signal
Optical
Delay
E
ori
E
delay
E
ori
+E
delay
E
ori
-E
delay
E
ori
-jE
delay
E
ori
+jE
delay
BR

Fig. 1. Principle of signal-carrier interleaved direct detection (SCI-DD): (a) 1/2 spectral
efficiency (SE) SCI-DD scheme, (b) 2/3 SE SCI-DD scheme, and (c) diagram of receiver
configuration of SCI-DD systems. SE is normalized to that of coherent detection. BR:
Balanced Receiver. E
ori
: the original signal. E
delay
: the delayed signal.
Comparing with conventional DD systems using one single photodiode, our SCI-DD
system requires extra components such as an optical delay line, an optical hybrid, and a pair
of balanced receivers. Hence we would like to touch upon some unique implementation
requirements related to SCI-DD. First, we consider the optical delay line the most critical part
of receiver that affects the performance of the SCI-DD system. The main feature about the
delay line is the polarization insensitivity. Namely, the delay line should be able to maintain
the polarization state so that the polarization of original signal and delayed signal can always
be aligned. This is true since the delay line is typically a few meters (for instance, 3 meters in
our demonstration), and the change of polarization state along such a short fiber can be
ignored. SCI-DD uses almost half of the coherent detection including one optical hybrid and
two balanced receiver. It is shown that 90 optical hybrid can be achieved by judicious
configuring two optical couplers [19], and therefore the cost is moderate. For the pair of
balanced receivers, since the two photodiodes or even the two pairs of the balanced receivers
can be packed into one single module, with mass production, we expect the cost of balanced
receivers would not be much higher than a single photodiode.
3. Experimental setup
In this paper, we demonstrate SCI-DD with OFDM (multicarrier) modulation, although the
SCI scheme can be applied to either single-carrier or multicarrier signals. The experimental
setup is illustrated in Fig. 2. As shown in the figure, an external cavity laser (ECL) is split
into two branches, one fed into a multiband OFDM generator, the other to an intensity
modulator for supplying the main carrier. The OFDM generator consists of an intensity
modulator for tone generations, and an optical IQ modulator driven by an arbitrary waveform
generator (AWG) at 10 GSa/s. Three optical tones are spaced at 8.75 GHz, which is multiple
of subcarrier spacing and therefore satisfies orthogonal-band multiplexing (OBM) condition
[17]. The FFT size is 128 points. The cyclic prefix (CP) is 22 points (2.2 ns). The middle 108
subcarriers out of 128 are filled for each OFDM band. 40 training symbols are attached to the
beginning of the OFDM frame. 16-QAM modulation is employed, thus the raw data rate of
our demonstrated system is 43.2 Gb/s for 3-band OFDM signal (with total optical bandwidth
of 26.25 GHz). The main carrier is switched on/off aligned with OFDM frames by driving the
intensity modulator with (1, 0, 1, 0) supplied by an AWG on corresponding OFDM frames.
Note that the carrier on/off window is synchronized with the OFDM symbol, and therefore
the bandwidth requirement for such intensity modulator is very low. For instance, in this
demonstration the carrier is switched at 33 MHz. The fiber lengths of the two paths (carrier
path and signal path) are carefully matched. It is worth noting that we split the main carrier
and signal into two paths because of the bandwidth limitation of our digital-to-analog
converters (DACs). The 3-dB bandwidth of the DACs we use is 3 GHz. In order to achieve a
data rate of 40 Gb/s, we have to do optical band multiplexing. In practice, both carrier and
signal will be provided by a single DAC, and the additional path for carrier is thus not
needed. It is also worth noting that because 2 AWGs are used, as mentioned, our CP length
#194237 - $15.00 USD Received 22 Jul 2013; revised 3 Oct 2013; accepted 6 Oct 2013; published 23 Dec 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 30 December 2013 | Vol. 21, No. 26 | DOI:10.1364/OE.21.032501 | OPTICS EXPRESS 32504
relatively long to combat time jitter of two AWGs. In practice, the length of CP can be greatly
reduced because only one AWG is needed. After the two paths are combined, the signals are
amplified and launched into an 80-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF). At the receiving
end, the signal is re-amplified and filtered with a 100-GHz WDM filter. The signals are then
split into two paths, with one branch delayed by one OFDM symbol (15 ns) with the other,
and then both fed into an optical hybrid for self-coherent detection. The signals from optical
hybrid are then detected by balanced receivers and sampled by a real time oscilloscope at
50 GSa/s.
To eliminate interference from any residual SSBN in balanced receivers, only odd
subcarriers of training symbols are filled for channel estimation [13]. The training symbols in
practice will be only used at acquisition stage and the subsequent channel estimation can be
recovered via the data, and therefore training symbols are not considered in overhead
computation for this demonstration. 2.16x10
6
bits of data are collected for BER computation.
80 km
SSMF
EDFA
LD
Synthesizer
Multiband OFDM Generator
IQ Modulator
IM
AWG
I Q
I AWG
Optical
Hybrid
BR
BR
T
D
S
One Symbol Delay
Optical Coupler
IM

Fig. 2. Experimental setup for SCI-DD-OOFDM transmission. IM: Intensity Modulator;
AWG: Arbitrary Waveform Generator; LD: Laser Diode; TDS: Time-domain Sampling Scope;
BR: Balanced Receiver.
4. Experimental results and discussion
Assuming the total power fed into receiver is fixed, it is easy to show that when signals are
mixed with the main carrier, the maximum mixing product is achieved when the main carrier
has the same power as signals. Namely, the optimal CSR for DD is expected to be 0 dB. To
verify whether this is the case in our experimental setup, we measure BER as a function of
CSR at back-to-back condition. The measurements are shown in Fig. 3(a). As expected, the
optimal CSR of 0 dB is observed for the 16-QAM signal. We also note that in the regime of
low CSR (for instance, 8 dB), the signal quality quickly degrades. This is mainly because
the CMRR of the balanced receivers is finite (typically 25 dB), leading to residual SSBN. If
the CSR is too low, the power of SSBN products would be significant compare with signal
itself, and thus the performance is degraded. We then identify the optimal launch power for
the 80-km SSMF transmission. We measure BER as a function of launch power at CSR of
0 dB. From the results in Fig. 3(b) we find that 0 dBm is the optimal launch power for the
43.2 Gb/s signal. When launch power is lower than 0 dBm, the transmission performance is
limited by amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise. While signal launch power goes
beyond 0 dBm, signals would suffer from fiber nonlinear noise.

Fig. 3. (a) BER performance as a function of CSR for a 43.2-Gb/s SCI-DD system. The
performance is measured at back-to-back while OSNR is 27 dB. Inset: optical spectrum of the
SCI-OOFDM signal at CSR of 0 dB. (b) BER performance as a function of the launch power
for 80-km SSMF transmission at CSR of 0 dB. Inset: Constellation of the recovered SCI-
OOFDM signal after 80-km SSMF transmission at launch power of 0 dBm.
#194237 - $15.00 USD Received 22 Jul 2013; revised 3 Oct 2013; accepted 6 Oct 2013; published 23 Dec 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 30 December 2013 | Vol. 21, No. 26 | DOI:10.1364/OE.21.032501 | OPTICS EXPRESS 32505
At last, we measure OSNR sensitivity of the system at the back to back and after 80-km
transmission. For all following measurements, the CSR is set to 0 dB, and launch power is
0 dBm. To obtain a reference for evaluating our proposed SCI-DD system, we first measure
OSNR sensitivity using coherent detection. By coherent detection, we mean the condition that
the main carrier is turned off at transmitter side, and at the receiver, instead of delaying the
signal and applying differential detection, we have a local oscillator for coherent detection.
As the green diamond dotted curve depicted in Fig. 4(a), the 14.4 Gb/s (single band)
coherently detected OFDM (CO-OFDM) 16-QAM signal requires 11 dB and 14 dB OSNR
for 20% FEC (BER = 1.9x10
2
) and 7% FEC (BER = 3.8x10
3
), respectively. We then
measure the 14.4 Gb/s SCI-OOFDM signals. It is found that the single band 16-QAM
14.4 Gb/s SCI-OOFDM requires 15 dB and 18 dB OSNR for 20% FEC and 7% FEC.
Therefore, the OSNR sensitivity of SCI-OOFDM is about 4 dB worse than CO-OFDM. The
reason for the 4-dB difference is as follows: while in coherent detection systems the local
oscillator is free from ASE noise, in this SCI-DD system the main carrier, propagating
through the transmission fiber, has the same signal-to-noise ratio as signal itself, and thus
ideally the OSNR sensitivity should be sacrificed by 3 dB. Additional 1 dB penalty is
attributed to be some residual SSBN in SCI-DD system. For reference, we also perform
numerical simulation of back-to-back transmission. In the simulation, the CMRR of balanced
receivers are set to infinity. The simulation results are shown in Fig. 4 (dashed curves). We
can see that for 14.4 Gb/s SCI-OOFDM signals, our experimental results agree well with the
simulation results at FEC threshold of 20%, and have 1 dB difference at 7% FEC threshold.
7% FEC
20% FEC
(a) (b)
7% FEC
20% FEC

Fig. 4. OSNR sensitivity of 16-QAM OFDM for (a) 14.4 Gb/s SCI-DD system (single band),
and (b) 43.2 Gb/s SCI-DD system (3 bands). Simu: Simulation, Co.: Coherent, DD: direct
detection, B2B: Back-to-back. Cancell.: (SSBN) Cancellation. Inset in (b): constellation of the
43.2 Gb/s SCI-OOFDM signal after 80-km SSMF transmission.
We then measure 3-band signal (with raw data rate of 43.2 Gb/s, or 40.4 Gb/s if excluding
7% FEC). From the results shown in Fig. 4(b), it can be seen that the 43.2 Gb/s signal
requires 20 dB OSNR for 20% FEC, and 24 dB OSNR for 7% FEC. In comparison with the
numerical simulation, at 20% FEC limit, our experimental results are 2 dB away from
simulation, and 3.5 dB away from simulation at 7% FEC threshold. Comparing with the BPS-
DD scheme that proposed earlier which is also DSB modulated, we find the SCI-DD has
much better OSNR sensitivity. For instance, to achieve 49.4-Gb/s date rate using 8-QAM
OFDM modulation, the BPS-DD system requires 32-dB OSNR at a BER of 1.9x10
2
[15].
This is 12 dB higher than a 43.20-Gb/s SCI-DD system with 16-QAM OFDM modulation.
Note that the balanced receiver we are using is off-the-shelf designed for 10-Gb/s data rate,
and the CMRR can be higher than 20 dB only within about 5 GHz bandwidth. For the
43.2 Gb/s signal, the electrical bandwidth is about 13 GHz, which is much wider than 5 GHz.
There could be some residual SSBN at frequency range beyond 5 GHz when we performed
SSBN cancellation for the 3-band signal [14]. Since majority of SSBN is removed by
balanced receivers, the cancellation needs only one iteration. We find that though SSBN
#194237 - $15.00 USD Received 22 Jul 2013; revised 3 Oct 2013; accepted 6 Oct 2013; published 23 Dec 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 30 December 2013 | Vol. 21, No. 26 | DOI:10.1364/OE.21.032501 | OPTICS EXPRESS 32506
cancellation does reduce the noise floor of the 16-QAM 43.2 Gb/s signal, the difference
between the two cases are very small as long as OSNR becomes lower than 26 dB. This
indicates that balanced receivers can effectively reject majority of SSBN.
5. Conclusion
We have proposed signal-carrier interleaved (SCI) optical OFDM for direct detected optical
communication. With such a scheme, we have successfully delivered 43.2-Gb/s OFDM
signals over 80-km SSMF without polarization multiplexing and with high electrical SE. Our
experimental results show that the 43.2-Gb/s 16-QAM OFDM signal requires 24-dB OSNR
when 7% FEC is employed.
#194237 - $15.00 USD Received 22 Jul 2013; revised 3 Oct 2013; accepted 6 Oct 2013; published 23 Dec 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 30 December 2013 | Vol. 21, No. 26 | DOI:10.1364/OE.21.032501 | OPTICS EXPRESS 32507