Single Side Band Direct Detection for Data Center Interconnect and Digital Radio Over Fiber

Distributed data-centers have emerged as a key architecture for future optical networks to satisfy the ever-growing demand for high speed connectivity and cloud services. This network architecture relies on high speed optical connections with interface rates beyond 100 Gb/s over 80 km. The conventional low-cost IM/DD transmission scheme cannot meet this performance requirement while the full coherent detection solution is still too expensive. As a result, alternative self-coherent detection (SCD) schemes such as single-side-band (SSB) transmission have attracted a lot of attention recently for high speed data center interconnect (DCI) applications. This invited paper provides a thorough overview about the progress of SSB transmission over the last five years. In addition, it also discusses an emerging application of SSB transmission scheme for high capacity digital radio-over-fiber (RoF) systems.