Theories and applications of chromatic

dispersion penalty mitigation in all optical

OFDM transmission system
Malaz Kserawi,
1
Satoshi Shimizu,
2
Naoya Wada,
2

Ahmed Galib Reza,
1
and June-Koo Kevin Rhee
1,*

1
Department of Electrical Engineering, KAIST, 291 Daehangro, Yuseonggu, Daejeon 305-701, South Korea
2
Photonic Network Group, New Generation Network Research Center, National Institute of Information and
Communications Technology (NICT), 4-2-1, Nukui-Kitamachi, Koganei-shi, Tokyo 184-8795, Japan
*
rhee.jk@kaist.edu
Abstract: Fiber chromatic dispersion (CD) in optical OFDM transmission
degrades carrier orthogonality, resulting in a system penalty. Such penalty
can be mitigated by per-carrier delay precompensation and spectrum
filtering. We present a theoretical model to investigate the CD impairment
in all-optical OFDM system, and demonstrate experimentally that both
methods restore performance without overhead or guard interval.
2013 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (060.2330) Fiber optics communications; (060.4230) Multiplexing; (060.7140)
Ultrafast processes in fibers; (070.2465) Finite analogs of Fourier transforms.
References and links
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#177431 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Oct 2012; revised 9 Nov 2012; accepted 10 Nov 2012; published 16 Jan 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 28 January 2013 / Vol. 21, No. 2 / OPTICS EXPRESS 1669
1. Introduction
All-optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (AO-OFDM) is a recently developed
novel technique where OFDM symbols at single channel rates beyond 100 Gbps are generated
by all optical circuitry. In the past years, many research groups have reported related theories
and proof-of-concept demonstrations [17], and are now advancing with novel component
and system technologies that can achieve data rates up to 26 Tbps [8]. Such high transmission
rates can be achieved by substituting the electrical processors of transceivers such as discrete
Fourier transform (DFT) with optical parallel circuits. Previous works suggested
manufacturing of an optical DFT circuit using time delays, phase shifters, and couplers [5,9],
delay interferometers [8,10], or arrayed waveguide gratings (AWG) utilizing slab-star
couplers [4,11,12]. Yet the key mechanisms of carrier orthogonality in AO-OFDM have not
been fully investigated. One of the major concerns rises how fiber transmission impairment
affects the carrier orthogonality. This paper introduces a mathematical model to investigate
chromatic dispersion (CD) penalty in the AO-OFDM transmission [58], and proposes a
novel system solution to restore carrier orthogonality, which eliminates requirement of guard
band [5,8] or OFDM cyclic prefix [6]. In this paper, we propose two zero-guard-band CD
penalty mitigation techniques based on theoretical understandings and demonstrate their
benefits experimentally. The first technique is per-carrier time-delay precompensation at a
transmitter, and the second is per-carrier optical bandpass filtering. We demonstrate for the
first time that the adjacent carrier interference due to CD can be mitigated by delay
adjustment and carrier bandwidth limit at the transmitter in an AO-OFDM system.
2. Theoretical model for all optical OFDM
The penalty of dispersion consists of two parts. The first problem is symbol waveform
deformation that causes inter-symbol interference (ISI), and the other is inter-carrier
interference (ICI). In order to investigate the impact of CD impairment in an AO-OFDM
transmission system, let us consider an AO-OFDM demultiplexer model of Fig. 1 [5,13],
which consists of delay ( )
( 1 ) j N m
m
T e

= (m = 0..N-1) and DFT phase-shift
2
N
j mn
mn
e

=
waveguide arrays for the n-th demultiplexer output port. Here, N and

denote the number of

OFDM carriers and the period of OFDM sampling, respectively, and hence the OFDM
symbol period is T
o
= N, and the carrier spacing is B = 1/T
o
. Neglecting a constant time delay
factor
( 1) j N
e

of ( )
m
T , and using 2 B = , the overall transfer function for the n-th
output port of the demultiplexer is then:
( ) ( )
( )
1 1
1
0.. 1.
0 0
,
jm n
n
N N
D e n N
m mn
N
m m
T




= =
= =
=

(1)
0
(N-2)
(N-1)
n-th
output
port
m=N-1
m=1
m=0
Delay Array DFT

Fig. 1. AO-OFDM demultiplexer model consisting of a delay array and a phase-shift array. In
the delay array, the earlier arriving part of an input OFDM symbol is time aligned by longer
delays.
An ideal OFDM symbol at carrier i in the time domain is represented as
( ) ( , )
j it
i i
s t a t T e

= , where a
i
is the symbol value of on-off keying (OOK), phase shift
keying (PSK), or quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), and rectangle function
#177431 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Oct 2012; revised 9 Nov 2012; accepted 10 Nov 2012; published 16 Jan 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 28 January 2013 / Vol. 21, No. 2 / OPTICS EXPRESS 1670
( , ) 1 t w = for 2 t w ; 0, otherwise. The corresponding frequency-domain representation of
( )
i
s t is ( ) ( ) sinc ( )
i i
S a i T = . The CD impairment of the fiber can be modeled as,
( )
2
2
=

j
C e , where
2
2 DL c = , and D , L , , and c, are the fiber CD coefficient,
fiber length, wavelength, and speed of light, respectively. Finally, the optical output
waveform of the i-th carrier at the n-th AO-OFDM demultiplexer port that has propagated
through an amplified fiber transmission system with an uncompensated fiber length of L can
be found by numerical inverse Fourier transform of the following expression:
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
2
( ) / 2
,
1
1
sinc ( )
0
.
jm n j
i n i n i
N
R S C D a i T e
N
m


+

= =
=

(2)
An example application of Eq. (2) to investigate the impact of CD in an AO-OFDM
transmission system model is achieved in an N = 4 carrier AO-OFDM system model as shown
in Fig. 2. In this model, carriers 0, 1, and 2 are amplitude modulated as shown in Fig. 2(a).
The carriers are separated by 10 GHz, and centered at a wavelength of 1550 nm. In a fiber
transmission system with no CD, ICI is inherently canceled by DFT at designated temporal
sampling positions of 50, 150, 450 ps in Fig. 2(b). Notice that all the ICIs are confined
within T
o
= 100 ps. As CD is introduced by 20 km of an SMF-28 fiber, the ICIs spread
broader than 100 ps, and shift in time (Fig. 2(c)) according to the group delay difference
between different carriers. As a result, carrier-carrier orthogonality is degraded as depicted in
Fig. 3(b) due to ICIs from adjacent and far carriers, which affect ICI-free time positions,
compared with that of the transmitter AO-OFDM symbol as shown in Fig. 3(a). More careful
speculations of the ICI position shift suggests a surprising observation; even though a spectral
side lobe of a transmitted carrier experiences the same group delay as the interfering carrier at
the same frequency, the ICI-free position shifts in time. Another observation is that ICI
waveform broadening produces residual power at ICI-free positions resulting in interference
even after orthogonal positions are aligned in the time domain.

Fig. 2. Symbol patterns |s
i
(t)|
2
for carriers i = 0, 1, and 2 (a), and the corresponding AO-OFDM
demultiplexed ICIs into carrier port n = 3 from carriers 0 (green), 1 (red), and 2 (black) in the
cases of B2B (b) and 20km SMF-28 transmission fiber (c). The carrier spacing is 10 GHz.
As the first zero guard band (ZGB) solution, we propose to adjust the carrier arrival time
at an AO-OFDM demultiplexer, as depicted in Fig. 3(c). In this scheme, ICIs are aligned to
each other so as to preserve ICI-free intervals at the centers of symbol periods. The proposed
scheme can be realized by addition of per-carrier tunable delay lines at the transmitter side as
shown in Fig. 4. Even though this AO-OFDM multiplexer design utilizes tunable optical
delay at every carrier to ease the understanding of the idea, actual system implementation of
delay
#177431 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Oct 2012; revised 9 Nov 2012; accepted 10 Nov 2012; published 16 Jan 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 28 January 2013 / Vol. 21, No. 2 / OPTICS EXPRESS 1671
(a) (b)
f
1
f
N
T
0
f
1
f
N
T
Chromatic Dispersion
f
1
f
N
T
0
f
1
f
N
T = T
0
+ T
cp
ZGB (Zero Guard Band)
mitigation
CP (Cyclic Prefix)
mitigation
(c)
(d)

Fig. 3. Schematic illustrations of CD impairment, (b), zero-guard-band mitigation, (c), and
cyclic prefix mitigation, (d), compared with a transmitted AO-OFDM symbol, (a). Grey
shading indicates ICI.
adjustment can be achieved simply by adjusting modulator reference clock phase electrically
instead of the optical delay adjustment.
Another ZGB technique is narrow-band filtering on all carriers at a transmitter so that
side-lobe frequency components into far carriers are removed completely. There are two-fold
benefits of carrier filtering, which are ICI and ISI reductions. Carrier filtering is an effective
alternative to precompensation since complete elimination of interference from far carriers is
better than null point alignment. However, filtering only is not fully effective on adjacent
carrier ICIs because of the spectrum overlap.
Other dispersion penalty mitigation in AO-OFDM was reported in the literature [58,11].
However, most proposals considered the addition of guard band interval, using cyclic prefix,
or sub-rate data modulation of carriers. Such methods can avoid dispersion penalty by ICI-
free interval broader than spread of ICIs as can be inspired from Fig. 3(d), but sacrifice a large
portion of the spectral efficiency and reduce the feasible data rates. The use of dispersion
compensation fiber (DCF) is another method to avoid the dispersion penalty but is not a
flexible solution especially under dynamic networking environment since wavelength
selective switching in WDM networks introduce channel-wise random residual CDs.
IDFT DFT
Tx Rx
Ch1
Ch2
Ch3
ICI

Fig. 4. Addition of narrow-band filters and tunable delay lines at the transmitter in order to
eliminate and align interference-free position.
3. Experimental results
The experimental setup to investigate our proposed scheme is shown in Fig. 5. A comb
consisting of 15 tones is generated using mode-locked laser diode (MLLD) and a filter at a
repetition rate of 10.7 GHz. The comb is fed into an AO-OFDM 1x16 AWG device [4]
(custom made by NEL, Tokyo) to generate 15 continuous-wave carriers separated exactly by
10.7 GHz. The rightmost inset of Fig. 5 shows a measured typical transfer function taken
from the port for carrier 8 of the AWG sample, overlapped on ideal transfer functions of all
#177431 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Oct 2012; revised 9 Nov 2012; accepted 10 Nov 2012; published 16 Jan 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 28 January 2013 / Vol. 21, No. 2 / OPTICS EXPRESS 1672
15 carriers. This transfer function is not ideal so it introduces ICI even in the back-to-back
system setup. Hence, we have to utilize partial polarization interleaving among even and odd

Fig. 5. Schematic of the experimental setup. The insets show the spectra of the comb source,
spectrum-sliced AO-OFDM carriers, the OFDM symbols derived from 15x10.7 GHz carriers,
and the AWG AO-OFDM demultiplexer filter function.
carriers. However, this arrangement does not alter the principle of ICI management by
precompensation. The inset of Fig. 5 shows the spectrum-sliced carrier spectrum after the first
AWG exhibiting only a 20-dB adjacent carrier suppression, which limits the system
performance in our experiment.
The outputs of the first AWG are separated into 5 groups in order to apply data and data
modulations from a pseudorandom bit sequence (PRBS) with a word length of 2
31
-1 to
carriers alternatively to decorrelate adjacent carriers. We applied polarization interleaving on
carriers to adjust adjacent carrier crosstalk to get reasonable ICIs for this proof of concept
experiment. Hence, we can control the precompensation alignment of only 4 adjacent
neighbors at a time since adjacent neighbors impose higher interference than far carriers. In
each group, 3 carriers with the same power and polarization have a frequency separation of
5x10.7GHz. These 3 carriers are modulated, polarization controlled, and delay-adjusted for
pre-compensation together. In our experimental setup, we characterized performance of
carrier 8 for application of both delay precompensation and carrier narrow-band filtering. The
filtering is applied on adjacent carriers 7 and 9. The 5-carrier groups are coupled together to
form an OFDM symbol centered at a wavelength of 1549.8nm whose spectrum is shown in
the inset of Fig. 5. The OFDM symbols are then transmitted through a 150-km dispersion
managed fiber transmission system followed by additional fiber options of lengths of 0km,
54km, 75km, and 83km, consisting of single-mode fibers (SMF-28) with a CD coefficient of
16 ps/nm/km. At the receiver side, symbols are demultiplexed using another 1x16 AWG. We
measure the BER of carriers from the AWG output with an O/E converter, clock data
recovery, and bit-error detector.
We first investigate the effect of delay precompensation with fiber lengths of 0km, 54km,
75km, and 83km. The corresponding group delays between adjacent carriers are measured to
be approximately 0ps, 55ps, 80ps, and 90ps, respectively. These group delays cause a
significant degradation of the eye pattern (Fig. 6(a)) and the corresponding increase of BERs
(Fig. 6(c)) due to orthogonality degradation. After applying delay pre-compensation with the
same aforementioned group delay values and hence restoring the ICI-free position alignment,
the eye pattern is improved as shown in Fig. 6(b), and the BER is reduced by approximately
an order of magnitude in the case of 83 km of uncompensated fiber, as shown in Fig. 6(c),
which corresponds to power penalty reduction from 3.7 dB to 2.1 dB. Considering dispersion
coefficient of 16 ps/nmkm and carrier modulation at 10.7 GHz, the compensation by this
method seems to be limited to 83km of residual uncompensated fiber, which corresponds to a
102-ps group delay that is comparable to T
0
. When group delay becomes larger than T
0
, ISI
An example of
filter function
of the AWG at
port 8
#177431 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Oct 2012; revised 9 Nov 2012; accepted 10 Nov 2012; published 16 Jan 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 28 January 2013 / Vol. 21, No. 2 / OPTICS EXPRESS 1673
FEC level
(a)
(b)
20 ps/div
(c)
10
-7
10
-6
10
-5
10
-4
10
-3
10
-2
0
B
E
R
20 40 60 80
Uncompensated fiber length (km)

Fig. 6. Eye diagrams of an OFDM demultiplexer output at carrier 8 after propagation through
54 km of fiber without precompensation (a) and with precompensation (b), and the BER of
carrier 8 with and without precompensation on a fiber transmission system, (c).
penalty becomes not negligible although ICI can be mitigated by precompensation.
Filtering can be implemented in parallel with delay precompensation for additional
improvement. Our observation from the experiment shows that lowering the ICI effect of
adjacent carriers is more important than removing interference from far carriers in the
spectrum. We installed the band pass filters with a full width of approximately 30 GHz at half
maximum on carriers 7 and 9 for our proof-of-concept test. The bandwidth limit on OFDM
symbols may degrade orthogonality in the back-to-back performance but it mitigates the
penalty from CD impairment. Figure 7 compares the results of filtering only and filtering with
delay precompensation. The experimental results clearly show that filtering successfully
reduces a large portion of the BER. As delay precompensation added, the majority of the
dispersion penalty is mitigated. Both techniques do not require any overhead or waste of the
spectrum usage. In our experiment, 128.4 Gbps is transmitted over 149.8 GHz. Considering
7% FEC overhead for a 120-Gbps transmission, the achieved spectral efficiency is
approximately 0.81 bps/Hz.
B
2
B
5
4
k
m
5
4
k
m
+
F
ilt
e
r
in
g
5
4
k
m

+

F
ilt
e
r
in
g

+
P
r
e
c
o
m
p
e
n
s
a
t
io
n
10
-7
10
-6
10
-5
10
-4
B
E
R

Fig. 7. BERs of carrier 8 in cases of back-to-back, 54km SMF, 54km with carrier filtering,
54km with carrier filtering and delay precompensation.
4. Conclusion and discussions
We investigated an AO-OFDM transmission with two dispersion mitigation techniques: delay
precompensation and carrier filtering. Experimental results show that applying both
techniques can reduce a large portion of the system BER penalty of chromatic dispersion with
no additional overhead. A total of 120 Gbps IM/DD transmission with FEC is successfully
achieved with 0.81 bps/Hz spectral efficiency with an 83-km fiber dispersion tolerance in an
SMF-28 transmission system. In addition, we introduced the corresponding mathematical
system model to study CD penalty in AO-OFDM transmission systems. The application of
dispersion precompensation is limited in maximum bit rate and achievable distance due to ISI
penalty caused by chromatic dispersion. In general, the number of carriers in not limited, but
the symbol modulation rate of carriers has to be the same in order to avoid interferences in the
time domain.

#177431 - $15.00 USD Received 3 Oct 2012; revised 9 Nov 2012; accepted 10 Nov 2012; published 16 Jan 2013
(C) 2013 OSA 28 January 2013 / Vol. 21, No. 2 / OPTICS EXPRESS 1674