Theoretical Analysis of the Four-Wave Mixing Effect in Virtual Carrier-Assisted DD MB-OFDM Ultradense WDM Metropolitan Networks

A theoretical method (TM) to evaluate the four-wave mixing (FWM) power in multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) ultradense wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) metropolitan networks using virtual carriers (VCs) and direct detection is proposed and validated numerically. It considers a band spacing of 3.125 GHz and 10-Gb/s data rate per band. A simplified TM (STM) to obtain the FWM power for MB-OFDM systems employing high-dispersion fiber is also proposed to relax the computation complexity. Both methods consider that FWM products generated from the mixing between two VCs and an OFDM band are dominant. Analytical expressions for the maximum allowed average power of the worst band (the band most impaired by FWM) are also derived. The TM and STM enable estimating the average power level per WDM channel corresponding to the threshold error vector magnitude (EVM) (threshold average power-TAP), where the threshold EVM is the maximum allowed EVM due to FWM, which induces a 2-dB EVM penalty to the EVM at the forward error correction threshold. Results show that, when a total data bit rate of 450 Gb/s is transmitted (nine WDM channels with five bands each) along the standard single-mode fiber (SSMF), the discrepancy between the numerical simulation-estimated and TM-estimated TAPs does not exceed 0.5 dB. By defining the upper bound of the power limit (UBPL) as the TAP obtained with 17 WDM channels, the discrepancy between the TM-estimated and STM-estimated UBPLs does not exceed 1 dB for transmission along up to 10 SSMF spans and for channel gaps up to 22.81 GHz.