Abstract

All-optical OFDM data transmission opens up a new realm of advanced optical transmission at extreme data rates, as subcarriers are multiplexed and demultiplexed by all optical discrete Fourier transforms (DFT). This paper reviews the principles of all optical OFDM transmission and its system application techniques, providing the generic ideas and the practical implementation issues to achieve 100Gbps or higher data rates with a spectral efficiency of 1 bps/Hz or better. This paper also include discussions on all-optical OFDM implementation variants such as an AWG-based OFDM multiplexer and demultiplexer, a receiver design without optical sampling, a transmitter design with frequency-locked cw lasers, an OFDM cyclic prefix designs, and a chromatic dispersion mitigation technique.

© 2011 Optical Society of America