Bandwidth-efficient synchronization for fiber optic transmission: system performance measurements

By any measure, the various services and applications which are crucial to today's society rely on fast, efficient, and reliable information exchange. Nowadays, most of this information traffic is carried over long distances by optical fiber, which has intrinsic advantages such as wide transmission bandwidth and low attenuation. However, continuing traffic growth has imposed many challenges, especially for equipment manufacturers who have to develop optical transmission solutions to handle the demand for higher data rates without incurring increased capital and operational costs. A feasible approach to overcoming these challenges is to scale the channel capacity by employing orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) super-channels. However, OFDM is sensitive to synchronization errors, which can result in complete failure of the receiver-based digital signal processing. Measurement results of various existing OFDM synchronization methods have highlighted inherent limitations with regards to poor system performance, which determines the quality-of-service level perceived by the end user, and complexity, which throws doubts as to their suitability for implementation in actual equipment. In this article, we provide a brief overview of optical transmission systems and some of their performance specifications. We then present a simple, robust, and bandwidth-efficient OFDM synchronization method and carry out measurements to validate the presented synchronization method with the aid of an experimental setup.