Non-optical Carrier SSB-OFDM PONs With the Improved Receiver Sensitivity and Potential Transmission Nonlinearity Tolerance

Receiver sensitivity can be improved by optical heterodyne reception. For our investigations, we implement a passive optical network (PON) to demonstrate the heterodyne reception scheme. In this paper, a novel non-optical carrier single-sideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (NOC-SSB-OFDM) scheme is proposed for intensity modulation and heterodyne detection-based passive optical networks (PONs). We study the effect of signal-signal beating interference (SSBI) for different guard bands (GBs), the line-width of the laser, and the carrier to signal power ratio (CSPR) on the performance of the proposed scheme. It is shown that the receiver sensitivity can be improved by about 4 dB at a bit error rate (BER) of 1 × 10
^-3
after 100-km single mode fiber (SMF) transmission by using the proposed NOC-SSB-OFDM scheme compared with the traditional SSB-OFDM scheme.