Optical OFDM for ultra-high capacity long-haul transmission applications

Optical OFDM is a promising modulation format for next generation fiber-optic transmission systems. The main challenges for optical OFDM are its sensitivity to laser phase noise and high PAPR. In this paper the phase noise tolerance is investigated for the two main phase noise compensation algorithms: carrier phase estimation (CPE) and RF-pilot (RFP) compensation. Furthermore, the nonlinear tolerance of OFDM is addressed for SSMF and LEAF, where it is shown that using RFP-based phase noise compensation a nonlinear improvement of up to 1 dB can be obtained.