DFT-based Offset-QAM OFDM For Optical

DFT-based offset-QAM OFDM for optical
communications
Jian Zhao*
Photonic Systems Group, Tyndall National Institute and Department of Physics, University College Cork, Lee
Maltings, Dyke Parade, Cork, Ireland
*jian.zhao@tyndall.ie
Abstract: We experimentally demonstrate and numerically investigate a

discrete-Fourier-transform (DFT) based offset quadrature-amplitude-
modulation (offset-QAM) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
(OFDM) system. We investigate the scheme using a set of square-root-
raised-cosine functions and a set of super-Gaussian functions as signal
spectra. It is shown that offset-QAM OFDM exhibits negligible penalty for
all investigated spectra, in contrast to rectangular-function based Nyquist
FDM (N-FDM) and sinc-function based conventional OFDM (C-OFDM).
The required guard interval (GI) length for dispersion compensation in
offset-QAM OFDM is analyzed and shown to scale with twice the
subcarrier spacing rather than the full OFDM bandwidth. Experimental
results show that 38-Gb/s offset-16QAM OFDM supports 600-km fiber
transmission with negligible penalty in the absence of GI while a GI length
of eight is required in C-OFDM. Further numerical simulations show that
by avoiding the GI, 112-Gb/s polarization multiplexed offset-4QAM
OFDM can achieve 23% increase in net data rate over C-OFDM under the
same transmission reach. We also discuss the design of the pulse-shaping
filter in the DFT-based implementation and show that when compared to N-
FDM, the required memory length of the filter for pulse shaping can be
reduced from 60 to 2 in offset-QAM OFDM regardless of the fiber length.
2014 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (060.2330) Fiber optics communications; (060.4080) Modulation.
References and links

1. B. Inan, S. Adhikari, O. Karakaya, P. Kainzmaier, M. Mocker, H. von Kirchbauer, N. Hanik, and S. L. Jansen,
Real-time 93.8-Gb/s polarization-multiplexed OFDM transmitter with 1024-point IFFT, Opt. Express 19(26),
B64B68 (2011).
2. D. Hillerkuss, R. Schmogrow, T. Schellinger, M. Jordan, M. Winter, G. Huber, T. Vallaitis, R. Bonk, P.
Kleinow, F. Frey, M. Roeger, S. Koenig, A. Ludwig, A. Marculescu, J. Li, M. Hoh, M. Dreschmann, J. Meyer,
S. B. Ezra, N. Narkiss, B. Nebendahl, F. Parmigiani, P. Petropoulos, B. Resan, A. Oehler, K. Weingarten, T.
Ellermeyer, J. Lutz, M. Moeller, M. Huebner, J. Becker, C. Koos, W. Freude, and J. Leuthold, 26Tbit/s line-rate
superchannel transmission utilizing all-optical fast Fourier transform processing, Nat. Photonics 5(6), 364371
(2011).
3. E. Giacoumidis, A. Tsokanos, C. Mouchos, G. Zardas, C. Alves, J. L. Wei, J. M. Tang, C. Gosset, Y. Jaouen, and
I. Tomkos, Extensive comparison of optical fast OFDM and conventional OFDM for local and access
networks, J. Opt. Commun. Netw. 4(10), 724733 (2012).
4. J. Zhao and A. D. Ellis, Advantage of optical fast OFDM over OFDM in residual frequency offset
compensation, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 24(24), 22842287 (2012).
5. X. Zhou, L. Nelson, P. Magill, B. Zhu, and D. Peckham, 8x450-Gb/s, 50-GHz-spaced, PDM-32QAM
transmission over 400km and one 50GHz-grid ROADM, in Proc. Optical Fiber Communications Conference
(2012), post-deadline paper PDPB3.
6. G. Bosco, A. Carena, V. Curri, P. Poggiolini, and F. Forghieri, Performance limits of Nyquist WDM and CO-
OFDM in high-speed PM-QPSK systems, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 22(15), 11291131 (2010).
7. J. Zhao and A. D. Ellis, Electronic impairment mitigation in optically multiplexed multicarrier systems, J.
Lightwave Technol. 29(3), 278290 (2011).
#200704 - $15.00 USD Received 5 Nov 2013; revised 2 Dec 2013; accepted 20 Dec 2013; published 10 Jan 2014
(C) 2014 OSA 13 January 2014 | Vol. 22, No. 1 | DOI:10.1364/OE.22.001114 | OPTICS EXPRESS 1114
8. Z. Dong, X. Li, J. Yu, and N. Chi, 6144 Gb/s Nyquist WDM PDM-64QAM generation and transmission on a
12-GHz WDM grid equipped with Nyquist band pre-equalization, J. Lightwave Technol. 30(23), 36873692
(2012).
9. J. G. Proakis, Digital Communications, (4th Edition), New York, McGraw-Hill (2000).
10. B. R. Saltzberg, Performance of an efficient parallel data transmission system, IEEE Trans. Commun. Technol.
15(6), 805811 (1967).
11. P. Siohan, C. Siclet, and N. Lacaille, Analysis and design of OFDM/OQAM systems basd on filterbank theory,
IEEE Trans. Signal Process. 50(5), 11701183 (2002).
12. K. Arya and C. Vijaykumar, Elimination of cyclic prefix of OFDM systems using filter bank based multicarrier
systems, in TENCON IEEE Region 10 Conference (2008), 15.
13. J. Zhao and A. D. Ellis, Offset-QAM based coherent WDM for spectral efficiency enhancement, Opt. Express
19(15), 1461714631 (2011).
14. S. Randel, A. Sierra, X. Liu, S. Chandrasekhar, and P. J. Winzer, Study of multicarrier offset-QAM for
spectrally efficient coherent optical communications, in Proc. European Conference on Optical Communication
(2011), paper Th.11.A.1.
15. S. Randel, S. Corteselli, S. Chandrasekhar, A. Sierra, X. Liu, P. J. Winzer, T. Ellermeyer, J. Lutz, and R. Schmid,
Generation of 224-Gb/s multicarrier offset-QAM using a real-time transmitter, in Proc. Optical Fiber
Communications Conference (2012), paper OM2H.2.
16. F. Horlin, J. Fickers, P. Emplit, A. Bourdoux, and J. Louveaux, Dual-polarization OFDM-OQAM for
communications over optical fibers with coherent detection, Opt. Express 21(5), 64096421 (2013).
17. Z. Li, T. Jiang, H. Li, X. Zhang, C. Li, C. Li, R. Hu, M. Luo, X. Zhang, X. Xiao, Q. Yang, and S. Yu,
Experimental demonstration of 110-Gb/s unsynchronized band-multiplexed superchannel coherent optical
OFDM/OQAM system, Opt. Express 21(19), 2192421931 (2013).
18. L. Liu, X. Yang, and W. Hu, Chromatic dispersion compensation using two pilot tones in optical OFDM
systems, in Proc. Asia Communications and Photonics Conference (2011), paper 830937.
19. J. Zhao and H. Shams, Fast dispersion estimation in coherent optical 16QAM fast OFDM systems, Opt.
Express 21(2), 25002505 (2013).
20. Q. Zhuge, C. Chen, and D. V. Plant, Dispersion-enhanced phase noise effects on reduced-guard-interval CO-
OFDM transmission, Opt. Express 19(5), 44724484 (2011).
21. A. Tolmachev and M. Nazarathy, Filter-bank based efficient transmission of reduced-guard-interval OFDM,
Opt. Express 19(26), B370B384 (2011).
22. Y. Tang, W. Shieh, and B. S. Krongold, DFT-spread OFDM for fiber nonlinearity mitigation, IEEE Photon.
Technol. Lett. 22(16), 12501252 (2010).
23. X. Liu, S. Chandrasekhar, B. Zhu, P. J. Winzer, A. H. Gnauck, and D. W. Peckham, 448-Gb/s reduced-guard-
interval CO-OFDM transmission over 2000 km of ultra-large-area fiber and five 80-GHz-Grid ORADMs, J.
Lightwave Technol. 29(4), 483490 (2011).
24. J. Zhao, S. K. Ibrahim, D. Rafique, P. Gunning, and A. D. Ellis, Symbol synchronization exploiting the
symmetric property in optical fast OFDM, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 23(9), 594596 (2011).
1. Introduction
Fig. 1. Spectra of conventional OFDM, N-FDM, and offset-QAM OFDM
Multicarrier techniques have attracted much interest for high-speed optical communication
systems [18], due to their higher spectral efficiency and enhanced tolerance to dispersion.
Two common multicarrier systems are conventional orthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (C-OFDM) [14] and Nyquist frequency (or wavelength) division multiplexing
(N-FDM/N-WDM) [58]. The former utilizes a sinc-function spectrum to achieve sub-
channel orthogonality while the latter employs filters at transmitters/receivers to create a
rectangular spectral profile (see Fig. 1). However, with either technique, there is a long
oscillating tail in the frequency or time domain, resulting in disadvantages such as
vulnerability to intercarrier interference (ICI) in C-OFDM and a long memory length for pulse
shaping in N-FDM.
Offset quadrature amplitude modulation (offset-QAM) is a group of modulation formats in
general communications [9], and has been investigated in multicarrier systems [1012].
Recently, this concept was introduced to optical communications [1317]. The concept can be
implemented in either the optical [13, 16] or electrical domain [14, 15]. It has been
theoretically proved that the required signal spectra for sub-channel orthogonality can be
greatly relaxed [13]. For example, the square-root-raised-cosine (SRRC) function (see Fig. 1),
well known for inter-symbol interference (ISI) free operation in the single-channel case,
cannot achieve sub-channel orthogonality in multicarrier systems unless offset-QAM formats
are used. Consequently, when compared to C-OFDM and N-FDM, offset-QAM OFDM
exhibits greatly improved performance and enhanced tolerance to filter bandwidth in the all-
optical domain [13]. However, previous studies in optical communications [1316] are based
on the configuration where sub-channels are modulated and detected on a sub-channel by sub-
channel basis. This implementation is difficult to scale to a large number of subcarriers.
Similar to C-OFDM, discrete-Fourier-transform (DFT) based implementation is more
computationally efficient. Additionally, channel equalization can be achieved at lower
complexity using one-tap equalizers, and phase estimation can be realized via pilot tones.
However, this implementation has not been investigated in optical communications.
In this paper, we demonstrate and investigate DFT-based implementation of offset-QAM
OFDM with both experiments and simulations. We discuss the design of the pulse-shaping
filter and dispersion compensation, and implement the system employing signal spectral
profiles of the SRRC functions whose roll-off coefficient is defined as , and the super-
Gaussian functions with different order numbers. It is shown that the proposed scheme can
support various signal spectral profiles with negligible performance penalty. We compare this
system to C-OFDM and N-FDM. The results show that DFT-based offset-QAM OFDM can
greatly relax the need of guard interval (GI) for dispersion compensation. When compared to
N-FDM, the required memory length of the filter for pulse shaping can be reduced to two
regardless of the transmission distance.
2. Principle of DFT-based offset-QAM OFDM
Figure 2 depicts the principle of multiplexing and de-multiplexing of offset-QAM OFDM. In
single-carrier offset-QAM, the quadrature signal is delayed by T/2 with respect to the in-phase
signal, where T is the symbol period. Offset-QAM OFDM multiplexes multiple sub-channels
carrying offset-QAM data, with /2 phase difference between adjacent sub-channels. This
scheme has been shown to exhibit greatly reduced crosstalk levels due to the relaxed
requirements for sub-channel orthogonality in either the optical and electrical domain [13
15].
In Fig. 2, modulation and detection are performed on a sub-channel by sub-channel basis.
Although this implementation is suitable to all-optical offset-QAM OFDM due to the
bandwidth limitation of optoelectronic devices, it is not efficient for DSP-generated schemes,
especially when the number of subcarriers and/or the memory length of the pulse-shaping
filter are large. Additionally, a multi-tap time-domain equalizer is required for each de-
multiplexed sub-channel at the receiver to compensate the channel response while DFT-based
implementation enables channel equalization at lower complexity using one-tap equalizers.
In this paper, we investigate a DFT-based offset-16QAM OFDM system, as illustrated in
Fig. 3. Two bi-polar four-amplitude-shift-keying (4-ASK) data are encoded with Gray coding.
For the in-phase tributary, the phases of even subcarriers are set to be 0 (or ) while those of
odd subcarriers are set to be /2 (or 3/2). Conversely, for the quadrature tributary, the phases
of odd subcarriers are set to be 0 (or ) while those of even subcarriers are set to be /2 (or
3/2). The quadrature tributary is then delayed by T/2 with respect to the in-phase tributary.
An inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) is applied to generate time-domain samples from the
in-phase tributary at times mT, and from the quadrature tributary at times (m + 1/2)T, where m
is an integer. The generated parallel outputs pass through finite impulse response (FIR) filters
for pulse shaping before parallel-to-serial (P/S) conversion. Assuming that ai,n and si,k are the
frequency-domain nth subcarrier data and the time-domain kth signal sample in the ith OFDM
symbol, the time-domain signal in C-OFDM can be obtained by:
Fig. 2. Principle of multiplexing and de-multiplexing of offset-QAM OFDM. N is assumed to

be an even number.
Fig. 3. Principle of DFT-based implementation for offset-16QAM OFDM

N 1
s (i N + k ) = ai ,n exp(2 j (i N + k ) n / N ) = si ,k k = 0,1...N-1 (1)
n =0
where N is the number of subcarriers. In offset-QAM OFDM where the impulse response of
the pulse-shaping filter in Fig. 2 is represented by h(k), the time-domain signal of OFDM
symbols may overlap so Eq. (1) has to be generalized as:
+ N 1
s real (i N + k ) = a real
p ,n
exp( j n / 2) exp(2 j ( p N + k ) n / N ) h (i N + k p N )
p = n = 0
+ N 1
= h (i N + k p N ) a real
p ,n
exp( j n / 2) exp(2 j ( p N + k ) n / N ) (2)
p =- n =0
= h (i N + k p N ) s real
p ,k
k = 0,1... N 1
p =-
Here, we only provide the time-domain signal s real (i N + k ) that is generated from the in-
phase tributary, aireal
, n . The time-domain signal generated from the quadrature tributary can be
readily obtained based on the same principle. Note that s real (i N + k ) is commonly a complex
signal although aireal
,n is real. exp(jn/2) in Eq. (2) represents the phase shifts on the sub-
channels. From the equation, it can be seen that the impulse response of the FIR filter k in Fig.
3 is the kth tributary demultiplexed, by a factor of N, from that of the filter in Fig. 2, h(iN + k-
pN), - < p < + . The complexity for pulse shaping is also reduced by a factor of N when
compared to the implementation in Fig. 2.
At the receiver, the received signal is serial-to-parallel (S/P) converted with the access
time of T/2, that is, the in-phase tributary accesses the sampled points from times mT while
the quadrature tributary accesses the sampled points from times (m + 1/2)T, where m is an
integer. The outputs pass through FIR filters that are matched to those at the transmitter. An
FFT is applied to transform the signals to the frequency domain. Without loss of generality,
we illustrate the principles for the in-phase tributary. Assuming that h(t) is designed based on
the criterion in [13], in an ideal channel (without phase noise, dispersion etc.), the frequency-
domain nth subcarrier signal for the ith symbol at the FFT output, bireal
, n , can be written as [13]:
, n ( ai , n + j ci , n ) exp( j n / 2)
bireal real real
(3)
where cireal
,n is a real value and represents the overall effects of the quadrature tributary of the
nth sub-channel and the crosstalk from adjacent sub-channels (the (n-1)th and (n + 1)th sub-
channels) in the ith OFDM symbol. Therefore, the data can be correctly decoded if the phase
shifts applied to the different subcarriers at the transmitters, exp(jn/2), are reversed and the
real part is then extracted. When phase noise and a dispersive channel are considered, Eq. (3)
is extended as:
, n ( ai , n + j ci , n ) exp( j n / 2) exp( j i ) exp( j 2 L fibern / 2) H b (n )

bireal real real 2
(4)
where i is the common phase error in the ith symbol. Lfiber and 2 are the fiber length and the
second-order dispersion value, respectively. Hb(n) represents the gain/loss at n, which is the
frequency of the nth subcarrier. Note that the effect of the dispersion, represented as a
frequency-dependent phase shift exp(j2Lfibern2/2), is valid under the restriction that the
length of the GI is sufficient to avoid ICI and ISI. The design of the GI will be discussed later
and we will firstly focus on phase and channel estimation in Eq. (4). Similar to DFT-based C-
OFDM, pilot tone can be employed for phase estimation in the proposed implementation. In
principle, pilot tone should be inserted as the DC to eliminate the influence of the dispersion.
In the case that the driving amplifiers are AC-coupled, pilot tone is inserted into a subcarrier
close to the DC such that exp(j2Lfibern2/2) 1. In addition, due to the suppressed spectral tail,
only the (n-1)th and (n + 1)th sub-channels would introduce ICI and ISI to the target nth sub-
channel. Therefore, adjacent sub-channels of the pilot tone are un-modulated to avoid the
cireal
,n term. The pilot tone for the ith symbol is then written as:
Pi ,n exp( j n / 2) exp( j i ) (5)
where n is set such that n is in the zero-frequency region. In Eq. (5), the value of the pilot
tone and Hb(n) are assumed to be 1. The pilot tone is then extracted, conjugated, and used for
phase correction.
On the other hand, dispersion estimation can be realized by using training symbols (TSs)
where the data on subcarriers are real-valued. In each TS, the data are inserted every two or
more subcarriers to avoid the cireal
,n term in Eq. (4). By using this design, similar to C-OFDM,
the response at a subcarrier frequency can be obtained by dividing the decoded signal by the
transmitted data at that frequency. Multiple TSs can be designed individually in various ways
[18] to not only mitigate the noise effect but also optimally reconstruct the response at all
subcarrier frequencies. In this work, the method with the concept described in [19] is used.
This method has been shown to exhibit higher tolerance to noise than the conventional time-
domain averaging methods when the number of TSs is small.
Next, we will discuss the design of the GI to enable the validity of Eq. (4). In contrast to
C-OFDM, the GI to avoid ISI and ICI in the presence of dispersion is greatly reduced in
offset-QAM OFDM. Dispersion in fiber links introduces two effects: 1) the pulse of each sub-
channel is broadened; 2) the pulses of different sub-channels transmit at different speed,
which results in time delays between sub-channels. The first effect is negligible especially for
a large number of sub-channels, as it scales with the bandwidth of each sub-channel. The
second effect scales with the bandwidth of the full OFDM spectrum and dominates the
performance. In C-OFDM, when there is no GI, the demultiplexing filter for the target sub-
channel is no longer orthogonal to other sub-channels. Due to the long spectral tails of the
sinc function, all sub-channels would introduce ICI (or ISI) to the target sub-channel (or the
target OFDM symbol). In order to avoid the ICI and ISI, the length of the GI should be larger
than the time delay between the sub-channels that have the largest distance in frequency. In
contrast, in offset-QAM OFDM, the spectral tail can be greatly suppressed. The ICI and ISI
due to the absence of GI are only from adjacent sub-channels after the demultiplexing filter.
The required GI length, TGI, is obtained as:
TGI = L fiber 2 (6)
is equal to the full OFDM bandwidth in C-OFDM and twice the subcarrier spacing in
offset-QAM OFDM, respectively. In a system with 10-GHz signal bandwidth and 128
subcarriers, it can be readily calculated that the required GI lengths after 600-km SMF
transmission (2 = 21.7 ps2/km) are 818 ps and 12.8 ps for C-OFDM and offset-QAM
OFDM, respectively. These values, in the discrete domain, correspond to 8 and 0 samples,
respectively. It is also expected from Eq. (6) that the larger the number of subcarriers, the
shorter the required GI length. Therefore, the proposed scheme may reduce the length of GI
for disperison compensation, in particular for a large number of subcarriers. Note that in C-
OFDM, reduced-guard-interval methods were also proposed [2023]. In [20], frequency-
domain equalization as similar to that in single-carrier formats was adopted, which however
would introduce additional complexity. In [2123], multi-band OFDM was investigated. This
technique is based on the combination of C-OFDM and N-FDM, where C-OFDM is adopted
in each sub-band and multiple sub-bands are multiplexed based on (quasi-) N-FDM.
However, similar to N-FDM as will be shown in Section 4, a large memory length is required
for pulse-shaping filters to create a near rectangular spectral profile for each sub-band and a
narrow guard band is still required between sub-bands to avoid spectral overlap. Additionally,
the required GI length scales with the bandwidth of each sub-band that commonly consists of
8~32 C-OFDM sub-channels. In contrast, our proposed scheme requires a much shorter GI
length that scales with twice the subcarrier spacing.
3. Experimental setup
Fig. 4. Experimental setup of coherent optical offset-16QAM OFDM, 16QAM C-OFDM, and
16QAM N-FDM. Insets show the spectra of these three signals.
Figure 4 shows the experimental setup. The IFFT and FFT used 128 points, of which 102
subcarriers were used for 16QAM data modulation. The six subcarriers in the zero-frequency
region were not modulated, allowing for AC-coupled amplifiers and insertion of pilot tones
for phase estimation. The positions of pilot tones were close to DC in order to reduce the
influence of dispersion. The twenty subcarriers in the high-frequency region were zero-
padded to avoid aliasing. The start-of-frame symbol of the sequence, designed based on the
principle similar to [24], was inserted to enable symbol synchronization. In offset-QAM
OFDM, the FIR filter created a set of SRRC functions with different roll-off values, and a set
of super-Gaussian functions with orders of two, three, and four. In all investigated cases, the
3-dB bandwidths of the shaped spectra were the same as the subcarrier spacing. It may be
shown from [13] that the first set of functions can achieve ICI and ISI free operation whilst
the second set has slight residual ICI and ISI. In C-OFDM and N-FDM, the spectral profiles
were the sinc function and the rectangular function, respectively. Insets of Fig. 4 show the
spectra of these three signals, where the SRRC function with a roll-off coefficient of 0.5 was
used in offset-QAM OFDM. It can be seen that offset-QAM OFDM avoided the long spectral
tails, and so exhibited greatly suppressed side lobes when compared to C-OFDM. On the
other hand, the spectrum of N-FDM was similar to that of offset-QAM OFDM. In all figures,
pilot tones in the zero-frequency region were allocated for phase estimation. The generated
signal was downloaded to an arbitrary waveform generator with 12-GS/s digital-to-analogue
converters (DACs). The signal line rate including forward error correction was 38 Gb/s.
A laser with 6-kHz linewidth was used to generate the optical carrier. Lasers with wider
linewidth could also be used but would place higher requirements on phase and frequency
offset estimation and the number of subcarriers in OFDM symbols. The electrical OFDM
signal was fed into an optical I/Q modulator with a peak-to-peak driving swing of 0.5V to
avoid nonlinear distortion. The generated optical signal was amplified by an erbium doped
fiber amplifier (EDFA), filtered by a 4-nm optical band-pass filter (OBPF), and transmitted
over a recirculating loop comprising 60-km single-mode fiber (SMF) with 14-dB fiber loss.
The noise figure of the EDFA was 6 dB and another 0.8-nm OBPF was used in the loop to
suppress the amplified spontaneous emission noise. The launch power per span was around
7 dBm to avoid the nonlinear effects.
At the receiver, the optical signal was detected with a pre-amplified single-polarization
coherent receiver. The use of single polarization was only due to device availability and the
proposed DFT-based offset-QAM OFDM scheme could be readily extended to polarization-
division-multiplexed (PDM) systems. A variable optical attenuator (VOA) was used to vary
the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) for the bit error rate (BER) measurements. The pre-
amplifier was followed by an optical band-pass filter with a 3-dB bandwidth of 0.64 nm, a
second EDFA, and another OBPF with a 3-dB bandwidth of 1 nm. A tap of the transmitter
laser signal was used as the local oscillator at the receiver. A polarization controller (PC) was
used to align the polarization of the filtered OFDM signal before entering the signal path of a
90 optical hybrid. The optical outputs of the hybrid were connected to two balanced
photodiodes with 40-GHz 3-dB bandwidths, amplified by 40-GHz electrical amplifiers, and
captured using a 50-GS/s real-time oscilloscope. The receiver algorithms included
interpolation, down-sampling, precise symbol synchronization [24], and decoding. The total
number of measured 16QAM symbols was around 240,000.
4. Experimental results
4.1 Back-to-back performance and sub-channel orthogonality
Figure 5(a) shows BER versus the received OSNR for offset-16QAM OFDM and multicarrier
systems using conventional QAM without offset, when the signal spectral profile is the SRRC
functions with different roll-off coefficients (defined as ). It can be seen that the performance
of offset-QAM OFDM was not sensitive to the value, and the required OSNRs to achieve a
BER of 1 103 were all around 15.5 dB. On the other hand, the system using conventional
QAM could still achieve similar performance as offset-QAM OFDM for = 0. In this case,
the system is equivalent to N-FDM. However, as increased, the orthogonality between sub-
channels was destroyed and the BER was degraded significantly. Figure 5(b) illustrates BER
versus the received OSNR when the signal spectral profile is super-Gaussian shaped with
different order numbers. Super-Gaussian functions cannot achieve ideal ICI and ISI free
operation. However, the residual ICI and ISI were not severe, so the performances of offset-
QAM OFDM using different order numbers were still similar to those of offset-QAM OFDM
in Fig. 5(a). On the other hand, the system using conventional QAM exhibited much poorer
performance, with the BER above 1 102 at an OSNR of 20.3 dB for all three cases. Higher-
order super-Gaussian function was closer to N-FDM, so exhibited slightly better performance
due to the reduced ICI level. Figures 5(c)-5(f) illustrate the constellation diagrams for the
systems using the SRRC functions when = 0 and 1. Figures 5(g)-5(j) depict the constellation
diagrams for the systems using second- and fourth-order super-Gaussian functions. The
figures confirm that offset-QAM OFDM could support various spectral profiles. In contrast,
the multicarrier systems without offset exhibited similar performance as offset-QAM OFDM
only when the SRRC function with = 0 was used.
Fig. 5. BER versus the received OSNR for multicarrier systems using offset-QAM and
conventional QAM when (a) the SRRC functions and (b) the super-Gaussian functions are
employed. Figures 5(c)-5(f): recovered constellation diagrams for the SRRC functions with
of 0 ((c)&(d)) and 1 ((e)&(f)) at 18.5-dB OSNR. Figures 5(g)-5(j): recovered constellation
diagrams for the super-Gaussian functions with order number of two ((g)&(h)) and four
((i)&(j)).
Figure 6(a) shows BER versus the roll-off coefficient at 18.5-dB OSNR for systems
using the SRRC functions. It is confirmed that the BER was stable (2~4 104) as varied
for offset-QAM OFDM. This is because all of these spectral profiles can satisfy the conditions
for ICI and ISI free operation [13]. In contrast, with conventional QAM, only the rectangular
spectrum ( = 0) could obtain ICI and ISI free operation. As increased, the ICI level
increased significantly. Even when = 0.1, the BER was 6.7 103. Figure 6(b) shows BER
versus the roll-off coefficient of the receiver filter when that of the transmitter filter is 0, 0.5
and 1. In order to ensure ISI and ICI free operation, the FIR filters at the transmitter and the
receiver should be matched. It can be clearly seen from the figure that the performance was
degraded significantly if the value of at the receiver was different from that at the
transmitter. This property may be potentially used in secure photonic communication systems.
Fig. 6. (a) BER versus the roll-off coefficient for OFDM systems with and without offset. (b)
BER versus the roll-off coefficient of the receiver filter for offset-QAM OFDM when the roll-
off coefficient of the transmitter filter is 0, 0.5 and 1. (a)-(b): the SRRC functions are used.
4.2 Transmission performance and comparison to C-OFDM
Fig. 7. (a) BER versus received OSNR (dB) for offset-QAM OFDM without GI. Insets show
the recovered constellation diagrams at 0 and 600 km. (b) BER versus fiber length for C-
OFDM with different GI lengths and offset-QAM OFDM without GI. (a)-(b): the SRRC
function with roll-off coefficient of 0.5 is used in offset-QAM OFDM.
Figure 7(a) shows BER versus the received OSNR for offset-QAM OFDM after 0-, 300-, and
600-km transmission. Insets illustrate the recovered constellation diagrams at 0 and 600 km.
In the figures, the SRRC function with roll-off coefficient of 0.5 was used and the GI length
was zero. It can be clearly seen that offset-QAM OFDM without any GI exhibited negligible
transmission penalty after 300 and 600 km. This matches the theoretical discussions in
Section 2. By using the SRRC function, the target sub-channel can be demultiplexed without
any ISI and ICI from the sub-channels with more than one sub-channel distance.
Consequently, the required GI only scales with twice the subcarrier spacing rather than the
full OFDM bandwidth. When the number of subcarriers is large, the GI may be eliminated for
dispersion compensation. This is in contrast to C-OFDM where the requirement for the GI
length is much more restricted. Figure 7(b) shows OSNR penalty at a BER of 2 103 versus
the fiber length for offset-QAM OFDM without GI and C-OFDM with different lengths of GI.
It is observed that in C-OFDM, when the GI length was zero, the system exhibited a large
OSNR penalty of >8dB even at 360 km. Increasing the GI length to four could improve the
performance but around 3-dB OSNR penalty was still observed at 600 km. A GI length of
eight was required to support 600-km transmission with negligible penalty. This matches the
theoretical analysis in Section 2 that the time delay between the sub-channels with the
maximum distance in frequency is ~800 ps. On the other hand, the performance of offset-
QAM OFDM without any GI was not sensitive to transmission distances up to 600 km. This
confirms the advantage of offset-QAM OFDM over C-OFDM in reducing the GI-induced
overhead for long-distance fiber transmissions.
4.3 Memory length of the FIR filter for pulse-shaping and comparison to N-FDM
The previous studies are based on a sufficient memory length for the pulse-shaping FIR filters
to create the desirable spectral profile. Figure 8(a) shows BER versus the memory length of
the pulse-shaping filter at 0 km using the SRRC function with different roll-off coefficients.
As expected, the time-domain signal was a sinc function when = 0 (rectangular spectral
profile as used in N-FDM), so a long oscillating tail existed, resulting in a required memory
length longer than 60 to realize the optimal performance. In contrast, the oscillating tail could
be significantly suppressed by increasing the value of to 0.5 or 1, and a memory length as
short as two was sufficient to achieve the optimal performance at 0 km. Figure 8(b) show
OSNR penalty at a BER of 2 103 versus the fiber length when the memory length of the
FIR filters is two. The case for = 0 could not achieve 2 103 so was not plotted in the
figure. It can be seen that even using a short memory length, the performance of offset-QAM
OFDM without GI was still insensitive to the transmission distance, and the OSNR penalty
was below 1 dB regardless of the fiber length. This confirms the advantage of offset-QAM
OFDM over N-FDM in reducing the pulse shaping induced implementation complexity.
Fig. 8. (a) BER versus the memory length of the pulse-shaping FIR filter for the SRRC
function with different roll-off coefficients. = 0 represents rectangular spectral profile (N-
FDM). The fiber length is 0 km; (b) BER versus fiber length for offset-QAM OFDM when the
memory length of the pulse-shaping FIR filter is two. (a)-(b): the length of the GI is zero.
5. Simulation results
In Section 4, experiments were carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed
implementation and the advantages over C-OFDM and N-FDM. It is shown that when
compared to C-OFDM, this technique can enhance the net capacity by avoiding the GI.
However, experiments may not be suitable to provide fundamental performance limit due to
various practical issues and/or device limitations. In this section, we simulate 112-Gb/s PDM
offset-4QAM OFDM and 224-Gb/s PDM offset-16QAM OFDM systems, and compare these
systems with C-OFDM to find out the ultimate increase in net capacity. The simulation setup
was similar to Fig. 4 except the use of dual-polarization coherent receiver. The sampling rate
of the DACs was 40 GS/s. The subcarrier number varied from 32 to 1024. For each case, the
number of zero-padded subcarriers in the high-frequency region was controlled such that the
signal line rate (including the GI in C-OFDM) was fixed to be 112 Gb/s and 224 Gb/s for
offset-4QAM (4QAM in C-OFDM) and offset-16QAM (16QAM in C-OFDM), respectively.
Nonlinearity was not considered in order to isolate the effect of dispersion. In offset-QAM
OFDM, the FIR filter created a set of SRRC functions with a roll-off coefficient of 0.5. The
sampling rate of the oscilloscope at the receiver was 40 GS/s. The total simulated 4QAM (or
16QAM) symbols were around 200,000.
Fig. 9. OSNR penalty versus CD for (a) PDM offset-4QAM OFDM without GI and
conventional PDM 4QAM OFDM with different GI lengths; (b) PDM offset-16QAM OFDM
without GI and conventional PDM 16QAM OFDM with different GI lengths. The subcarrier
number is 128.
Figure 9 shows the OSNR penalty versus CD for (a) PDM (offset-) 4QAM OFDM and (b)
PDM (offset-) 16QAM OFDM when the subcarrier number is 128. It can be seen that when
GI was not used in C-OFDM, the performance was degraded rapidly as CD increased. The
transmission reach was extended by using a longer GI, which however reduced the net data
rate. 16QAM OFDM was more sensitive to ISI so exhibited poorer CD tolerance than 4QAM
OFDM. On the other hand, offset-QAM OFDM without GI significantly outperformed C-
OFDM with 0% GI. Offset-4QAM and offset-16QAM OFDM could realize transmission
reaches the same as those of the C-OFDM with 18.75% and 12.5% GI length, respectively.
Offset-16QAM OFDM was employed in the experiments in Section 4 to illustrate the
advantages due to higher implementation difficulty. However, offset-4QAM OFDM would be
more suitable to find out fundamental limit on dispersion tolerance due to its lower OSNR
requirement and higher tolerance to nonlinear effects.
As discussed in Section 2, the CD tolerance of offset-QAM OFDM scales with twice the
subcarrier spacing, so inversely with the subcarrier number at a fixed OFDM bandwidth.
Figure 10(a) shows the OSNR penalty versus CD for 112-Gb/s PDM offset-4QAM OFDM
with different subcarrier numbers. As expected, the larger the subcarrier number, the better
the CD tolerance. For 1024 subcarriers, 112-Gb/s PDM offset-4QAM OFDM could support
~36,000 ps/nm without any GI at the 3-dB penalty, which corresponded to the dispersion
value of ~2,100-km fiber. Figure 10(b) illustrates supported CD values at the 3-dB penalty
versus the subcarrier number. It can be seen that the transmission reaches scaled linearly with
the subcarrier number for both offset-QAM OFDM and C-OFDM. For subcarrier numbers
larger than 64, ~18.75% GI was required in C-OFDM to achieve the same performance as
offset-QAM OFDM without any GI. This verifies that the presented scheme is more suitable
for long-distance transmissions, with 1/(1-0.1875) = 23% increase in net data rate.
Fig. 10. (a) OSNR penalty versus CD for PDM offset-4QAM OFDM without GI and with
different subcarrier numbers; (b) Supported CD values at the 3-dB OSNR penalty versus the
subcarrier number for offset-4QAM OFDM and conventional 4QAM OFDM.
6. Conclusions
We have investigated a DFT-based implementation for offset-QAM OFDM that can achieve
sub-channel (quasi-) orthogonality using various spectral profiles. We have experimentally
transmitted a 38-Gb/s offset-16QAM OFDM signal over 600-km SMF, and numerically
investigated 112-Gb/s PDM offset-4QAM and 224-Gb/s PDM offset-16QAM OFDM. It is
shown that offset-QAM OFDM exhibits negligible penalty for signal spectral profiles of the
SRRC functions with arbitrary roll-off coefficient and the super-Gaussian functions with
different order numbers, in contrast to rectangular-function based N-FDM and sinc-function
based C-OFDM. When compared to C-OFDM, this scheme may relax the GI for dispersion
compensation, and so is more suitable to high-speed long-distance transmissions. When
compared to N-FDM, the required memory length of the pulse-shaping filter in offset-QAM
OFDM can be reduced from 60 to 2 regardless of the fiber length, resulting in greatly reduced
implementation complexity.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by Science Foundation Ireland under grant number 11/SIRG/I2124
and 06/IN/I969.

DFT-based Offset-QAM OFDM For Optical

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

DFT-based Offset-QAM OFDM For Optical

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

DFT-based offset-QAM OFDM for optical

Abstract: We experimentally demonstrate and numerically investigate a

References and links

Fig. 1. Spectra of conventional OFDM, N-FDM, and offset-QAM OFDM

Fig. 2. Principle of multiplexing and de-multiplexing of offset-QAM OFDM. N is assumed to

Fig. 3. Principle of DFT-based implementation for offset-16QAM OFDM

, n ( ai , n + j ci , n ) exp( j n / 2) exp( j i ) exp( j 2 L fibern / 2) H b (n )

TGI = L fiber 2 (6)

4.2 Transmission performance and comparison to C-OFDM

You might also like