Optical OFDM Basics

Abstract

We have witnessed a dramatic increase of interest in orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) from optical communication community in recent years. The number of publications on optical OFDM has grown dramatically since it was proposed as an attractive modulation format for long-haul transmission either in coherent detection [1] or in direct detection [2, 3]. Over the last few years, net transmission data rates grew at a factor of 10 per year at the experimental level. To date, experimental demonstration of up to 1 Tb s − 1 transmission in a single channel [4, 5] and 10.8 Tb s − 1 transmission based on optical FFT have been accomplished [6], whereas the demonstration of real-time op..