Bandwidth-Efficient Modulation for Hybrid 10G/100G Optical Communication Networks

This letter proposes and experimentally demonstrates a novel scheme to generate 10G/100G hybrid signal in a short-reach optical communication system. The optical transmitter, which serves 10 and 100-Gb/s channels simultaneously, is realized using Nyquist frequency-multiplexing independent-sideband (NFM-ISB) modulation. For each optical wavelength, there are as many as four 10-Gb/s and one 100-Gb/s NFM-ISB digital channels carried by subcarrier multiplexing scheme, which can be cost-efficiently generated using only one set of optical transmitter hardware. More importantly, compared with the conventional system with independent optical transmitter, the proposed system requires at least five times less downlink optical transmitters, which can be translated into savings in cost, power consumption, and footprint.