All-optical OFDM transmission of 7 x 5-Gb/s

data over 84-km standard single-mode fiber

without dispersion compensation and time gating
using a photonic-integrated optical DFT device
I. Kang,
1,*
M. Rasras,
2
X. Liu,
1
S. Chandrasekhar,
1
M. Cappuzzo,
2
L. T. Gomez,
2
Y. F.
Chen,
2
L. Buhl,
1
S. Cabot,
3
and J. Jaques
3

1
Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, 791 Holmdel-Keyport Road, Holmdel, New Jersey 07733, USA
2
Bell Laboratories, Alcatel-Lucent, 600 Mountain Avenue, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974, USA
3
LGS Innovations, 15 Vreeland Road, Florham Park, New Jersey 07932, USA
*inuk.kang@alcatel-lucent.com
Abstract: We implement dispersion-tolerant and time-gating-free all-
optical OFDM transmission using a photonic-integrated discrete Fourier
transform (DFT) device. We show that 35-Gb/s OFDM data having near-
unity spectral efficiency can be transmitted all-optically with 1-dB
dispersion margin of ~1000 ps/nm. The passive-optical DFT circuit is
implemented using multi-mode interference (MMI) couplers on a high
index-contrast silica integrated-optic platform. We also propose a photonic
DFT circuit based on an NxN MMI device capable of simultaneous
channelization of OFDM signals into N subcarriers.
2011 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (060.0060) Fiber optics and optical communications; (250.3140) Integrated
optoelectronic circuits.
References and links
1. W. Shieh and I. Djordjevic, OFDM for Optical Communications (Academic Press, 2010).
2. S. Chandrasekhar, X. Liu, B. Zhu, and D. W. Peckham, Transmission of a 1.2-Tb/s 24-carrier no-guard-interval
coherent OFDM superchannel over 7200-km of ultra-large-area fiber, ECOC '09, PD2.6 (2009).
3. H. Sanjoh, E. Yamada, and Y. Yoshikuni, Optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing using
frequency/time domain filtering for high spectral efficency up to 1bit/s/Hz, OFC 2002, ThD1 (2002).
4. A. Sano, H. Masuda, E. Yoshida, T. Kobayashi, E. Yamada, Y. Miyamoto, F. Inuzuka, Y. Hibino, Y. Takatori,
K. Hagimoto, T. Yamada, and Y. Sakamaki, 30x100-Gb/s all-optical OFDM transmission over 1300 km SMF
with 10 ROADM nodes, ECOC 2007, PDS 1.7 (2007).
5. D. Hillerkuss, M. Winter, M. Teschke, A. Marculescu, J. Li, G. Sigurdsson, K. Worms, S. Ben Ezra, N. Narkiss,
W. Freude, and J. Leuthold, Simple all-optical FFT scheme enabling Tbit/s real-time signal processing, Opt.
Express 18(9), 93249340 (2010).
6. K. Takiguchi, T. Kitoh, A. Mori, M. Ogima, and H. Takahashi, Integrated-optic OFDM demultiplexer using
slab star coupler-based optical DFT circuit, ECOC 2010, PD1.4 (2010).
7. Z. Wang, K. S. Kravtsov, Y.-K. Huang, and P. R. Prucnal, Optical FFT/IFFT circuit realization using arrayed
waveguide gratings and the applications in all-optical OFDM system, Opt. Express 19(5), 45014512 (2011).
8. I. Kang, M. Rasras, M. Dinu, M. Cappuzzo, L. T. Gomez, Y. F. Chen, L. Buhl, S. Cabot, A. Wong-Foy, S. S.
Patel, C. R. Giles, N. Dutta, J. Jaques, and A. Piccirilli, All-optical byte recognition for 40-Gb/s phase-shift-
keyed transmission using a planar-lightwave-circuit passive correlator, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 20(12),
10241026 (2008).
9. T. Healy, F. C. Garcia Gunning, A. D. Ellis, and J. D. Bull, Multi-wavelength source using low drive-voltage
amplitude modulators for optical communications, Opt. Express 15(6), 29812986 (2007).
10. M. Bachmann, P. A. Besse, and H. Melchior, General self-imaging properties in N N multimode interference
couplers including phase relations, Appl. Opt. 33(18), 39053911 (1994).
11. S. Corzine, P. Evans, M. Kato, G. He, M. Fisher, M. Raburn, A. Dentai, I. Lyubomirsky, R. Nagarajan, M.
Missey, V. Lal, A. Chen, J. Thomson, W. Williams, P. Chavarkar, S. Nguyen, D. Lambert, T. Butrie, M. Reffle,
R. Schneider, M. Ziari, C. Joyner, S. Grubb, F. Kish, and D. Welch, 10-channel x 40Gb/s per channel DQPSK
monolithically integrated InP-based transmitter PIC, OFC 2008, PDP18 (2008).
#144077 - $15.00 USD Received 14 Mar 2011; revised 18 Apr 2011; accepted 19 Apr 2011; published 25 Apr 2011
(C) 2011 OSA 9 May 2011 / Vol. 19, No. 10 / OPTICS EXPRESS 9111
1. Introduction
Coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CO-OFDM) has received much
attention as a promising technique in supporting transport capacity beyond 100Gb/s [1]. It is
also recognized that CO-OFDM is a powerful tool not only for tightly packing high data rate
signals within the ITU grid, but also for combining multiple high data-rate coherent channels
into a super-channel carrying >Tb/s traffic [2]. As is the case with single-carrier coherent
modulation formats, the excellent transmission performance of CO-OFDM is in large part due
to the advancement of high-speed digital signal processing for computationally compensating
various transmission penalties. The high-speed electronic processing, however, has the
drawback of high power consumption, which increases with increasing processing speed.
Thus, it is desirable to perform some of the signal processing all-optically, preferably
using passive devices, so that the burden on the electronic signal processing and power
consumption are minimized. The fact that the discrete Fourier transform (DFT), which is the
critical operation for channelizing orthogonally multiplexed subcarriers, can be all-optically
performed was realized early on in the development of optical OFDM [3,4]. This can be seen
from the equation for DFT in the context of demultiplexing an OFDM signal ( ) E t into
subcarrier channel E
n
[3]:


E
n
= E(t (m1)T)e
j 2t(n1)(m1)/ N
m=1
N

, (1)
where N is the number of subcarriers and T( = symbol period/N) is equivalent to the sampling
time. Thus, all-optical DFT can be implemented using essentially passive devices comprising
optical delay lines with incremental temporal delay of T and optical phase shifters for
adjusting the optical phases of the delay lines. Several groups have reported all-optical OFDM
(AO-OFDM) using all-optical DFT in various configurations including a single-stage
asymmetric Mach-Zehnder interferometer (AMZI) [3,4], two-stage cascaded AMZIs [5], a
10x10 slab star coupler [6], and most recently simulation of an arrayed waveguide gratings
(AWG) device for demultiplexing up to 16 OFDM channels [7].
These prior studies, however, have not investigated the tolerance of AO-OFDM against
residual chromatic dispersion. In CO-OFDM with electronic processing, chromatic dispersion
is compensated before channelization via electronic fast Fourier transform (FFT) [2]. Hence,
it is important to verify that AO-OFDM is stable against residual chromatic dispersion with
sufficient margin if it is to be practical. Otherwise, all-optical DFT is either incompatible with
coherent detection in the presence of residual dispersion, or the residual dispersion needs to be
fully compensated before channelization using a per-channel optical tunable dispersion
compensator (TDC) but the added cost of the TDC reduces the value of all-optical DFT.
In addition, temporal gating was needed in previous work to optically filter out coherent
inter-carrier crosstalk in the time domain. The time gating introduces several complications:
first, temporal gating requires an optical modulator per subcarrier, which increases the optical
losses and becomes impractical when N becomes large. Second, the duration of temporal
window within which the inter-carrier cross talk is suppressed is in the order of T ( = symbol
period/N). Therefore, these N time-gating optical modulators should have sufficient
modulation bandwidth to be able to support generation of short temporal gates. Finally, the
time gating needs to be synchronized with the data stream with a channel-dependent time
delay, adding to the complexity.
In this paper, we report experimental demonstration of all-optically demultiplexing an
OFDM signal using a compact integrated-optic DFT without resorting to optical temporal
gating. In addition we demonstrate successful demultiplexing in the presence of large
chromatic dispersion. We implement all-optical discrete DFT (N = 8) for demultiplexing near-
unity spectral-efficiency (0.93 accounting for 7% FEC overhead) OFDM channels consisting
#144077 - $15.00 USD Received 14 Mar 2011; revised 18 Apr 2011; accepted 19 Apr 2011; published 25 Apr 2011
(C) 2011 OSA 9 May 2011 / Vol. 19, No. 10 / OPTICS EXPRESS 9112
of 5-Gb/s-per channel NRZ-OOK signals. The all-optical DFT is implemented using a silica
planar light wave circuit (PLC). The dispersion tolerance is demonstrated by transmitting 7 x
5-Gb/s of OFDM data over 84-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) (D = 1430 ps/nm)
without dispersion compensation, with required OSNR of 18.5 dB (3 dB penalty relative to
back-to-back) for bit error rate (BER) of 10
3
. Finally, we propose an all-optical OFDM
demultiplexer using an NxN MMI for simultaneous parallelization of OFDM signals.
2. Photonic-integrated all-optical DFT device
We show a layout of the photonic-integrated all-optical DFT circuit in Fig. 1. The circuit
consists of 1x8 (8x1) multi-mode interference (MMI) couplers for splitting (combining)
optical signals, optical delay lines, thermo-optic phase shifters, and variable optical
attenuators (VOAs) [8]. The relative temporal delays between the delay lines are T = 25 ps,
corresponding to the free-spectral range (FSR) of 40 GHz. The device is realized on the
platform of silica PLC having 4% index contrast and has an overall size of 0.8 cm x 3 cm. The
VOAs are used for compensating the imbalance of the MMI splitting ratio (<1dB) and the
eight phase shifters are used to properly tune the optical phase of each delay line. We show
also in Fig. 1 a transmission spectrum of the all-optical DFT circuit tuned for demultiplexing
OFDM channels, wherein the experimentally measured spectrum is in good agreement with
the theoretical curve expected for 8-channel discrete Fourier transform convolved with the
response function of the optical spectrum analyzer (resolution = 0.016 nm). The transmission
of the all-optical DFT device can be tuned to select a desired subcarrier either by tuning each
phase shifters or more conveniently tuning the temperature of the entire PLC chip. We note
that simultaneous demultiplexing of eight subcarriers can be achieved by using an 8 x 8 MMI
for the output coupler. We will discuss the design of such a device in section 4.

Fig. 1. (Left) all-optical DFT circuit (N = 8). (Right) solid (dashed) curve: a measured
(calculated) optical spectrum of the all-optical DFT circuit.
3. Experiment
In Fig. 2, we show a schematic of the experimental set up for transmission of OFDM signals.
We generate 5-GHz spaced optical frequency combs by sinusoidally modulating DFB laser
output (1554.02 nm) using a lithium-niobate (LN) Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) followed
by a LN phase modulator [9]. The seven central combs (Ch.1-Ch. 7) have spectral flatness
better than 1.5dB and are used for bit error rate testing. The generated combs are split into two
sets (even and odd) using a delay line interferometer with 10-GHz FSR. Each comb set is
modulated by 5-Gb/s NRZ OOK data (2
15
-1 PRBS) that are decorrelated with each other.
After optical amplification to compensate for the optical losses in the modulators, the two data
streams are polarization- and time-aligned before getting combined by a PM coupler to
generate the AO-OFDM signal, which was then launched into standard single mode fiber
(SSMF). After transmission through SSMF, the optical signal is amplified by a two-stage
EDFA before being sent into the all-optical DFT circuit for channel selection. Each subcarrier
is selected one at a time by tuning the optical DFT circuit thermally. An additional optical
band-pass filter having 0.2-nm spectral width is inserted to reduce the amount of ASE from
the EDFAs but it does not contribute to channel selection. The optical receiver has a 3-dB
electrical bandwidth of 15 GHz; note that the other electronics in the set up have electrical
#144077 - $15.00 USD Received 14 Mar 2011; revised 18 Apr 2011; accepted 19 Apr 2011; published 25 Apr 2011
(C) 2011 OSA 9 May 2011 / Vol. 19, No. 10 / OPTICS EXPRESS 9113
bandwidths narrower than 12.5 GHz. We emphasize that no temporal gating is used in the
setup to filter out inter-carrier interference.

Fig. 2. Experimental setup. Insets (from top left in clockwise direction): optical spectrum of the
spectral combs, optical spectrum of the OFDM signal, and filtered spectrum of Ch. 4 of the
OFDM signal.
In Fig. 3(a), we show the back-to-back (b-t-b) BER performance of all seven subcarriers
(35 Gb/s) covering 30-GHz span. The required OSNR are measured for the entire combs with
1-nm resolution and referred to 0.1-nm resolution. The required OSNR for 10
3
BER is on
average 15 dB for the seven channels, which is comparable to 15.1 dB expected for 35-Gb/s
single-carrier non-coherent NRZ-OOK. We show eye diagrams for Ch.4 and Ch.7 in Fig. 3.
They exhibit ~25-ps wide clear eye opening within which the orthogonality condition is
satisfied and inter-carrier interference is suppressed. The temporal duration is sufficient to
allow BER measurements with 12.5-GHz bandwidth electronics without using optical gating.

Fig. 3. (a) BER vs. required OSNR. (b) Eye diagram for Ch. 4 (center channel). (c) Eye
diagram for Ch. 7 (edge channel).
We recall that it has been widely claimed that optical time gating is necessary to isolate
the temporal windows with open eyes while filtering out the inter-carrier coherent cross talk.
The claim is valid under a tacit assumption that the photodetector receiving the demultiplexed
OFDM signal has a limited electrical bandwidth that is only comparable to the symbol rate, as
the bandwidth limitation would convert the coherent inter-carrier interference to inter-symbol
interference and cause penalty. However, if the photodetector and the processing electronics
have sufficient electrical bandwidth to isolate and discern the temporal regions with open
#144077 - $15.00 USD Received 14 Mar 2011; revised 18 Apr 2011; accepted 19 Apr 2011; published 25 Apr 2011
(C) 2011 OSA 9 May 2011 / Vol. 19, No. 10 / OPTICS EXPRESS 9114
eyes, then the optical time gating can be obviated. Of course, the use of higher-speed
electronics can be justified when the electronics technology is mature enough not to incur
excess cost increase. In this paper, we provide an example where using electronics with higher
bandwidth than what symbol rate requires nevertheless delivers a substantial performance
enhancement over the case where optical temporal gating is used. We achieve this by
judicious choice of symbol period (200 ps) and the number of subcarriers (N = 8). This choice
should allow ~25-ps (200 ps/8) wide temporal windows free of inter-carrier interference, in
agreement with the measurement. Therefore, electronics having a 3-dB bandwidth of ~12
GHz ( = 0.3/25 ps) should be sufficient to isolate the interference-free temporal regions
without incurring too much inter-symbol interference. In addition, the cost increase should be
minimal given the maturity of 10G electronics. The observation indicates that baud rates and
the number of subcarriers need to be selected carefully to enable AO-OFDM operation
without having to use costly time gating. In this regard, it will be quite challenging to pursue
all-optical OFDM for high-baud rate and many subcarrier applications as this would require
high-speed electronics (proportional to N x baud rate) or multiple high-speed optical
modulators for time gating.
Next, we test the tolerance of the all-optical OFDM against chromatic dispersion. For this
we insert SSMFs with different lengths and measure BER performance. In Fig. 4(a), we plot
the typical required OSNR for BER of 10
3
as a function of the accumulated dispersion or
SSMF length. It is observed that the dispersion margin for 1-dB OSNR penalty is ~1000
ps/nm. This is substantially better than ~45 ps/nm for 40-Gb/s NRZ-OOK and the OFDM
channels behave effectively as ~8.5 Gb/s concerning the chromatic dispersion. This implies
that the all-optical OFDM scheme we implemented is compatible with the existing 10G
infrastructure; no per-channel tunable dispersion compensation will be required to
demultiplex OFDM channels all-optically. Dispersion tolerance can be further enhanced with
minimal cost increase using an electronic equalization technique such as MLSE detection and
transmission of ~40 Gb/s data over 100-km SSMF should be feasible without dispersion
compensation. We believe the dispersion tolerance is a result of the low modulation speed per
subcarrier as most of the dispersion penalties would result from the interference from the
nearest neighboring subcarriers. In Fig. 4(b), we plot BER of Ch. 4 after transmission through
84-km (1430 ps/nm) SSMF, whose eye diagram is shown in Fig. 4(c). The penalty relative to
b-t-b case is 3 dB (6 dB) for BER of 10
3
(10
9
). The excellent dispersion tolerance and the
use of 10G-compatible electronics suggest that all-optical OFDM in the configuration as we
demonstrated is a good candidate for upgrading optical communication systems from 10 Gb/s
to 40 Gb/s or higher data rates if the AO-OFDM transmitters and receivers including the all-
optical DFT can be implemented economically, for which photonic integration is crucial.

Fig. 4. (a) Required OSNR for 10
3
BER as a function of dispersion. (b) BER of Ch. 4 for 84-
km SSMF transmission (solid) and for b-t-b (hollow). (c) Eye diagram of Ch. 4 after 84-km
SSMF transmission.
#144077 - $15.00 USD Received 14 Mar 2011; revised 18 Apr 2011; accepted 19 Apr 2011; published 25 Apr 2011
(C) 2011 OSA 9 May 2011 / Vol. 19, No. 10 / OPTICS EXPRESS 9115
4. NxN MMI-based all-optical DFT for simultaneous channelization
For practical deployment, it is essential for a single optical DFT to process demultiplexing of
all N subcarrier channels. In this section, we give details on how to implement an all-optical
DFT demultiplexer based on an NxN MMI that is capable of simultaneous channelization of
all subcarriers of an OFDM signal. We demonstrate that such simultaneous channelization is
possible by using an NxN MMI for combining the time-delayed OFDM signals instead of an
Nx1 MMI. An NxN MMI schematically shown in Fig. 5 imparts phase shifts

|
io
onto the
signal entering into the i-th input waveguide and exiting the o-th output waveguide according
to [10]:
( )(2 ), if ( ) even,
4
io
o i N o i i o
N
t
| t = + + + = (2)


|
io
=
t
4N
(i +o1)(2N i o+1), if (i +o) = odd. (3)

Fig. 5. Schematic of labeling of the waveguides of an NxN MMI.
The goal is to connect the optical delay lines to the MMI input waveguides and to adjust
the phase of each delay arm in such a way that the phase relations of the MMI ensure that the
DFT condition is simultaneously satisfied for all signals exiting the N output ports.
Mathematically, these operations can be written as

1
( ( 1) ) ,
m mn
N
j j
n
m
E E t m T e e
A
=
=

(4)
where E
n
is the subcarrier having carrier frequency

f
1
+(n1) / NT
,

A
m
is the phase shift to
be applied by the phase shifter in the delay line having (m-1)T relative temporal delay, and

mn
is the phase shift applied by the MMI unto the signal originating from the m-th delay line.
Note that the index m(n) does not directly refer to the m(n)-th waveguide of the MMI in Fig.
5. Instead, these phase shifts

mn
and

A
m
can be expressed using the phase matrix of the
MMI,

|
io
in Eqs. (2) and (3):

( ), ( ) mn m n
| = (5)


A
m
=|
(m),(1)
(6)
with a function that rearranges the matrix elements by the rule


: m2m1 for ms N / 2 (, where N / 2 ( is the celing integer value of N / 2. (7)
: 2( 1 ) for / 2 . m N m m N + > (
(
(8)
Equations (5)(8) specify that m-th delay line (with delay of (m-1)T) should be connected
to

(m)
-th input waveguide of the MMI and n-th subcarrier having frequency

f
1
+(n1) / NT

emerge out of ( ) n th output waveguide of the MMI.
Equivalently, the frequency

f
o
of the subcarrier exiting from the o-th output waveguide
can be expressed as
#144077 - $15.00 USD Received 14 Mar 2011; revised 18 Apr 2011; accepted 19 Apr 2011; published 25 Apr 2011
(C) 2011 OSA 9 May 2011 / Vol. 19, No. 10 / OPTICS EXPRESS 9116


f
o
= f
1
(1)
o
o/ 2

/ NT , where o/ 2

is the floor integer value of o/ 2. (9)
The above equations can be understood in more concrete terms using a specific example;
we show a wiring diagram for the case of N = 8 in Fig. 6. In Fig. 6, we denote the signal path
that needs to be connected to an input waveguide of the 8x8 MMI by indicating the relative
temporal delay of the path and the relative optical phase shifts . The signal in each path is a
replica of the OFDM signal and the method by which the replicas are obtained is not
important, whether a single 1x8 power splitter or multiple 1x2 couplers are used to split the
OFDM signal. We calculate the transmittance of such-configured all-optical DFT circuit and
show the spectra in Fig. 6 (right). The spectrum is consistent with that required for
demultlexing an OFDM signal consisting of 8 subcarriers.

Fig. 6. (left) Schematic illustrating wiring of delay lines with the input waveguides of an 8 x 8
MMI for DFT application. The paired numbers on the input waveguide side refer to the relative
delay and phase shift of the optical delay lines, and the numbers on the output waveguides refer
to the carrier frequency of the signal exiting from each waveguide. (right) transmission spectra
(in linear scale) of the signals from the eight output ports of the device on the left.
5. Summary
We successfully implemented an all-optical DFT device in an integrated-optic platform that
enabled demultiplexing of a 7x5-Gb/s NRZ-OOK based AO-OFDM signal, without the use of
optical temporal gating and even in the presence of large chromatic dispersion. We also
presented a design of all-optical DFT based on an NxN MMI capable of simultaneous
channelization of an OFDM signal consisting of N subcarriers. The approach that we have
demonstrated here can be scaled to higher net data rates. For example, if each subcarrier was
modulated by 10-Gb/s (5 Gbaud) DQPSK signals, transport capacity approaching 100-Gb/s
can be realized with dispersion tolerance comparable to that of 10G transport systems with
reduced amount of computation and energy consumption. Crucial to the successful
deployment of AO-OFDM is photonic integration of elements including photodetectors and
we believe the level of integration that can support the optical DFT and photodetectors is
within the capability of the current state of the art [11].

#144077 - $15.00 USD Received 14 Mar 2011; revised 18 Apr 2011; accepted 19 Apr 2011; published 25 Apr 2011
(C) 2011 OSA 9 May 2011 / Vol. 19, No. 10 / OPTICS EXPRESS 9117