Real-time optical OFDM long-reach PON system over 100 km SSMF using a directly modulated DFB laser

A real-time base-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transceiver with a simple symbol synchronization and channel estimation scheme is implemented on only one off-the-shelf commercial field programmable gate array (FPGA). The real-time optical OFDM long-reach passive optical network (PON) system with direct detection over 100 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) employing a cost-effective directly modulated distributed feedback (DFB) laser has been successfully demonstrated experimentally. The experimental results show that the simplified symbol synchronization with low complexity and high accuracy is effective for long-reach optical OFDM transmission systems. After 100 km SSMF transmission, the power penalty at a bit-error rate of 1e-3 is only about 1.1 dB.