OFDM for adaptive ultra high-speed optical networks

The introduction of OFDM into optical communications provides an exciting opportunity for future ultra high-speed optical networks that may offer adaptable rate, subwavelength accessibility, 'plug & play' automatic installation, monitoring, and maintenance. CO-OFDM presents an alternative pathway toward 1 Tb/s Ethernet. As such, CO-OFDM offers a smooth road map of line rate migration from 100 Gb/s, to 400 Gb/s, to 1 Tb/s. Due to the chromatic dispersion in fiber, multicarrier signal possesses nonlinearity advantage over single-carrier at 100 Gb/s and beyond. Opto-electronic integration for 1-Tb/s OFDM transceiver is becoming a fertile field for future research. A few-mode fiber is investigated to deliver a capacity beyond 100 Tb/s per fiber.