Optical OFDM - A Promising High-Speed Optical Transport Technology

Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) is a widely used modulation/multiplexing technology in wireless and data communications. Leveraging recent advances in high-speed CMOS technologies and optical modulation and detection technologies, optical OFDM at 40-Gb/s or even 100-Gb/s information rate becomes feasible. At the optical transmitter, OFDM is realized by a digital signal processor (DSP) using inverse fast Fourier transformation (iFFT) with subsequent digital-to-analog conversion (DAC) and Cartesian electro-optic modulation. At the receiver, the signal optical field is first reconstructed, e.g., by coherent detection. Then reverse signal processing is applied to recover the original data. OFDM enables efficient compensation of transmission effects such as chromatic dispersion and polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) that often are prohibiting impairments for cost-effective realization of high-speed optical transport systems. In light of the emerging demand for 100+Gb/s data rate in future optical transport systems, optical OFDM is considered as a promising enabling technology. In this paper, optical OFDM architecture will be reviewed, and its performance under various system conditions will be discussed and compared with alternative technologies. The challenges in the implementation of optical OFDM will also be discussed.