100-Gb/s Direct-Detection OFDM Transmission on Independent Polarization Tributaries

We propose a low-overhead method of polarization-multiplexed direct detection optical orthogonal frequency-division-multiplexing transmission that requires no digital multiple-input and multiple-output processing at the receiver. Optical filtering of carrier components allows a simple polarization separation. Using 16-quadrature amplitude modulation and only 31-GHz bandwidth, 100-Gb/s transmission over 80 km of standard single-mode fiber is successfully demonstrated. The crosstalk penalty was only 1.2 dB. We also investigated the laser frequency offset tolerance for the proposed 100-Gb/s transmission method.