Abstract

Current wavelength switched optical networks are forecasted to evolve and acquire elastic functionalities, achieved by using a flexible grid and deploying tunable transceivers with variable bandwidth and bitrate [1]. An interesting approach is the combination of these gridless functionalities with time domain multiplexing techniques [2]. Ampli-fication of the expected bursty data streams seems to be one of the challenges when using Erbium Doped Fiber Am-plifiers (EDFAs), as the burst pattern can cause non-negligible gain transients. Employing Optical Orthogonal Fre-quency Division Multiplexing (O-OFDM) based on electronic Digital Signal Processing (DSP), each transceiver can be dynamically adapted to different modulation formats and/or bandwidth occupancies while achieving sub-wavelength granularity [3]. In this paper a burst-enabled tunable intensity-modulated direct-detection O-OFDM transceiver based on Fast Hartley Transform (FHT) is experimentally characterized.

© 2013 IEEE