Proceedings of IC-NIDC2009

BASEBAND OFDM OPTICAL SINGLE-SIDEBAND TRANSMISSION WITH PARALLEL OPTICAL SSB MODULATION FOR DIRECT DETECTION
Jing Ning, Yaojun Qiao, Yuefeng Ji
Key Laboratory of Information Photonics and Optical Communications(BUPT), Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, China ningjing1983@gmail.com, qiao@bupt.edu.cn, jyf@bupt.edu.cn

Abstract
A novel baseband OFDM optical SSB transmission scheme using parallel optical SSB modulation is proposed for long-haul optical transmission. Since the proposed scheme adopts the traditional SSB modulation theory and only uses the even sub-carriers to transmit data, simulations show that it has higher tolerance to the signal-signal beat interference and the nonlinearity effects comparing to the known baseband direct detection OFDM schemes. Keywords: Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM); Parallel optical singlesideband modulation (P-OSSB); Conventional optical single-sideband modulation (C-OSSB); Signal-signal beat interference (SSBI); Fiber nonlinearity

comparing with other DD-OFDM systems [2-4]. However, these baseband-DD-OFDM OSSB systems mainly contain two defects. The major drawback is that they are failed to consider how to overcome the influence of the signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) produced by the photodiode reception [11]. Additionally, the ability of combating fiber nonlinearity is also poor. These schemes will be referred to as conventional optical SSB baseband DD-OFDM (C-OSSB) in the following. In order to overcome these problems, we propose a novel scheme to generate a baseband-DD-OFDM optical SSB signal by using a parallel optical single-sideband (P-OSSB) modulator. The P-OSSB modulator based on the traditional SSB modulation theory is composed of two parallel dual-drive MZMs. Meanwhile, for overcoming the SSBI, only the even subcarriers are used to transmit the data and the odd subcarriers are left unused, because the SSBI will only fall on the odd subcarriers [11]. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme has higher tolerance to SSBI and nonlinearity effects comparing to C-OSSB OFDM systems.

1 Introduction
Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a multi-carrier modulation technique where the data stream is carried by many orthogonal and lower rate subcarrier tones; it has been widely employed into wireless communications and numerous digital standards [1]. Recently, OFDM has aroused much attention in optical fiber communications as its high tolerance to chromatic dispersion (CD) [2-4] and polarization mode-dispersion (PMD) [5-7]. Besides powerful but complex coherent reception studies, direct detection optical OFDM (DD-OFDM) using only a simple direct detection receiver was also identified. Meanwhile, in order to overcome CD, optical single-sideband (OSSB) modulation method should been applied into the DD-OFDM system. Currently, some schemes [8-10] have been proposed to realize the baseband-DD-OFDM OSSB transmission, which do not require modulating the electrical baseband OFDM signal into the radiofrequency (RF) field and can save half bandwidth ___________________________________ 978-1-4244-4900-2/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE

2 The P-OSSB OFDM Transmitter Architecture

2.1 Parallel Single-sideband Modulation Theory According to the traditional SSB modulation theory [12], the following is also a SSB signal:
(t ) a (t ) 1  n(t )  jn

(1)

(t ) is the where n(t ) is a real baseband signal, and n Hilbert transform of n(t ) . Therefore, if modulated the SSB signal on an optical carrier f 0 , an optical SSB signal will be obtained:
E (t ) a (t ) exp( j 2S f 0t )

(2)

Basing on the traditional SSB modulation theory, we proposed a P-OSSB modulator which is composed of two parallel dual-drive MZMs each with different bias point, as shown in Figure1. First of all, in order to generate a chirp free optical signal, the two dual-drive MZMs are both driven by equal amplitude and negative polarity signals. So in Figure 1, only one driving signal into each MZM is shown, and the concretely driving signals for the two MZMs are:
d1 xm(t )  VS / 4

(3) (4)

Figure 2. Simulation setup for the P-OSSB baseband OFDM system

d2

(t ) / 2  VS / 2 xm

3 Simulation Setup
where VS is the modulators switching voltage; x is
(t ) are a modulation parameter; m(t ) and m respectively the real baseband OFDM signal and the Hilbert transform of m(t ) ; VS / 4 and VS / 2 represent different bias points of the two MZMs. According to d1 , d 2 and the modulation function of MZM, we can obtain the output expression of the P-OSSB transmitter: 1 x x (t )] (5) Eoutput | exp( j 2S f 0t ) u [1  m(t )  j m VS VS 2

The performance of the proposed system is investigated using numerical simulations by VPIsystems VPItransmissionMaker WDM V7.6. Figure 2 shows the simulation setup for the POSSB DD-OFDM system. The data rate is 10Gbps, the number of subcarriers is 256 and 16-QAM encoding is used, so the bandwidth of the system is 5GHz. After IFFT conversion, the cyclic prefix (CP) is added into each OFDM symbol, which accounts for 1/16 of the all subcarriers. Therefore, the duration of an OFDM symbol is 25.6ns and the CP is 1.6ns. For simplicity, the nonlinearity of the two parallel MZMs has been precompensated completely. The output of the P-OSSB modulator is sent into four spans of SSMF with a total distance of 320km without any optical inline dispersion management. After detection using a simple photodiode, the signal is demodulated in the OFDM receiver which includes the simple electrical dispersion equalization (EDC) behind the FFT convert. In EDC, 8 symbols were used as the training sequence to estimate the phase rotation of different carrier frequencies caused by the CD in fiber. For comparison a C-OSSB DD-OFDM [8-9] is also simulated. The data rate is also 10Gbps with 256 4QAM modulated subcarriers. If using 4QAM modulation for each subcarrier, 5GHz signal bandwidth will be obtained which equals to the propose P-OSSB DD-OFDM scheme. At the same time, CP and EDC are also included in the system.

From Eq. (2) and (5), it can be seen that the optical SSB signal will be obtain by using the POSSB modulator. In Eq. (5), the x / VS must be less than one.

Figure 1. Parallel Optical Single-Sideband (P-OSSB) modulation configuration

2.2 The input signals To obtain a real baseband OFDM signal and only use the even subcarriers to transmit useful data, the input vector to the IFFT must be constrained to have Hermitian symmetry. If using N subcarriers to transmit the useful data, 4 N subcarriers will be needed as the input of the IFFT. The corresponding mode is shown below:
I
* * * * 0 b10 b2 0 ....0 bN-10 bN 0 bN 0 bN-1 0.... b2 0 b1   
  
2N subcarriers 2N subcarriers

4 Simulation Result
A Monte Carlo evaluation is conducted to identify the transmission performance. Figure 3 shows the baseband OSSB spectrum after the P-OSSB modulator. The lower sideband suppression is almost ideal. The frequency phase shift of 64 subcarriers after 320km transmission is shown in Figure 4. As is

(6)

where b* K denotes the complex conjugate of b K .

known to that, as long as the length of the CP is more than CD, CD simply causes a frequency phase rotation of each OFDM subcarrier. Therefore, by using the training sequence, EDC can correctly recover the phase of each subcarrier. The insets in Figure 4 show the constellations before a) and after b) the EDC respectively.

Figure 6 depicts the system Q factor of the received data versus the optical launch power for the both schemes after 320km transmission, with OSNR 23dB. It can be seen that the P-OSSB scheme has higher nonlinearity tolerance probably due to the larger subcarriers spacing which could suppress the nonlinear effects like four-wavemixing (FWM) and cross-phase modulation (XPM) etc [11].

Figure 3. Optical spectrum after P-OSSB modulator

Figure 6. Q factor vs. the optical launch power

5 Conclusions
We have demonstrated a novel method of transmitting baseband OFDM over fiber with POSSB modulation and direct detection. Simulations in 320km SMF link show that P-OSSB OFDM has 4.5 dB OSNR benefits comparing with C-OSSB OFDM system in linear case, and stronger capability of combating the nonlinearity than COSSB OFDM system. Therefore, the simplicity and potential of the technique make P-OSSB OFDM a promising alternative scheme for long-haul optical transmission.

Figure 4. Frequency phase shift of 64 subcarriers For comparing to C-OSSB baseband DD-OFDM, Figure 5 displays the BER performance for the both schemes after 320km transmission. In these simulations, the nonlinearity of fiber is not considered. The results show 4.5dB benefits of required OSNR for P-OSSB scheme comparing with the C-OSSB scheme. This decrease of required OSNR for P-OSSB can be explained by the improved capability of overcoming the SSBI.

Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by National 863 Program (No.2009AA01Z253), National 973 Program (No. 2007CB310705), the NSFC (No.60772024, No.60711140087), SRFDP (200800130001), ISTCP (No. 2006DFA11040), PCSIRT (No. IRT0609), P.R.China and Fujitsu R&D Center Co., Ltd.

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Figure 5. BER performance for the both schemes

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