Time and frequency offsets in all optical OFDM systems

Abstract

Ultra-high-speed data transmission (terabit-per-second per channel) is urgently required in optical communication systems to fulfill the emerging demands of 3D multimedia applications, cloud computing, and bandwidth-hungry applications. In one way by using singlecarrier optical communication systems for the data transmission rates 1 Tb/s, we need the high baud rate and/or the high-order modulation formats (i.e. 512-QAM, 1024-QAM). Another way is to group the data carrying subcarriers without a guard bands (tightly spaced) to form a superchannel which gives increase in channel capacity. In a superchannel, the requirements of high-order modulation formats and high baud rates are relaxed. In an alloptical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (AO-OFDM) system, the subcarriers are orthogonal and closely packed which gives more suitability to form superchannel. This thesis focuses on the time and frequency offsets in AO-OFDM systems. A theoretical model to investigate the performance of on-off-keying (OOK) modulated AO-OFDM system is developed for analytical simulation. The analytical (statistical) model considers the random characteristics of time and frequency offsets in adjacent subcarriers as well as the common noise sources such as shot and thermal noises to calculate the interference variances for evaluating the BER performance. The effects of time and frequency offsets on the BER performance of AO-OFDM system is evaluated with the number of optical subcarriers (NSC), receiver bandwidth (BWRX), and cyclic prefix (CP) We further develop an analytical model to evaluate the performance of AO-OFDM system with advanced modulation format (M-QAM) in the presence of time and frequency offsets, and the performance is compared with numerical simulations of other emulation setups (oddand- even subcarriers and decorrelated systems). The performance is investigated with NSC, BWRX, and CP in AO-OFDM system. A delay-line interferometer based all-optical method to reduce the effects of time and frequency offsets is proposed and evaluated. Finally, performance of demultiplexed subcarriers from an optical discrete Fourier transform (O-DFT) in AO-OFDM system in the presence of chromatic dispersion and limited modulation bandwidth is evaluated. The fiber Bragg grating (FBG) based passive device is proposed to reduce the interference and the results are compared with existing method using sampling gates. The proposed method using FBG for interference reduction provides a cost-effective design of AO-OFDM system.