Performance Investigation of IM/DD Compatible SSB-OFDM Systems Based on Optical Multicarrier Sources

The authors investigate and compare the performance of three different optical frequency comb sources in an intensity modulated and directly detected compatible SSB OFDM system. The influence of relative intensity noise and carrier-to-noise ratio of the different multicarrier sources, on the performance of a 12.5 Gb/s compatible SSB OFDM system, were investigated experimentally and by simulation. The results obtained show that, system performance depends significantly on the relative intensity noise and carrier-to-noise ratio levels of the specific multicarrier optical source employed. However, it is shown that optical multicarrier sources with low relative intensity noise and high carrier-to-noise ratio levels can assure very good performance in a WDM-OFDM system.