Optical Field Reconstruction of Real-Valued Modulation Using a Single-Ended Photoreceiver With Half-Symbol-Rate Bandwidth

Heterodyne detection based on a single-ended photodetector is of great interest to simplify the receiver frontend complexity compared to a full coherent one, while retaining the ability of digital chromatic dispersion (CD) compensation. Nevertheless, single-ended heterodyne detection schemes typically require a transmitter, which has similar complexity as in coherent systems. Moreover, a receiver bandwidth equal to at least the symbol rate of the signal is required for the complex-valued signal recovery when using a single-ended photodetector. In this article, we study a novel heterodyne detection scheme, which allows to use a simple transmitter structure, and to reduce the receiver bandwidth to a value well below the symbol rate, while supporting digital CD compensation. In our experiment, a real-valued signal originates from a single-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator at the transmitter. A bandwidth-limited receiver suppresses one sideband of the incoming signal, however the receiver digital signal processing (DSP) reconstructs the missing sideband based on the Hermitian symmetry of a real-valued signal spectrum. A receiver bandwidth slightly larger than half of the symbol rate is required. With our novel DSP, we successfully recover 60 Gbaud PAM-4 signal after 80 km of fiber transmission in C-band, using 33 GHz electrical bandwidth at both transmitter and receiver, without optical filtering or amplification.