Photonic generation of Terahertz (THz) carriers displays high potential for THz communications with a large tunable range and high modulation bandwidth. While many photonics-based THz generations ...have recently been demonstrated with discrete bulky components, their practical applications are significantly hindered by the large footprint and high energy consumption. Herein, we present an injection-locked heterodyne source based on generic foundry-fabricated photonic integrated circuits (PIC) attached to a uni-traveling carrier photodiode generating high-purity THz carriers. The generated THz carrier is tunable within the range of 0-1.4 THz, determined by the wavelength spacing between the two monolithically integrated distributed feedback (DFB) lasers. This scheme generates and transmits a 131 Gbits
net rate signal over a 10.7-m distance with -24 dBm emitted power at 0.4 THz. This monolithic dual-DFB PIC-based THz generation approach is a significant step towards fully integrated, cost-effective, and energy-efficient THz transmitters.
Client-side optics are facing an ever-increasing upgrading pace, driven by upcoming 5G related services and datacenter applications. The demand for a single lane data rate is soon approaching 200 ...Gbps. To meet such high-speed requirement, all segments of traditional intensity modulation direct detection (IM/DD) technologies are being challenged. The characteristics of electrical and optoelectronic components and the performance of modulation, coding, and digital signal processing (DSP) techniques are being stretched to their limits. In this context, we witnessed technological breakthroughs in several aspects, including development of broadband devices, novel modulation formats and coding, and high-performance DSP algorithms for the past few years. A great momentum has been accumulated to overcome the aforementioned challenges. In this article, we focus on IM/DD transmissions, and provide an overview of recent research and development efforts on key enabling technologies for 200 Gbps per lane and beyond. Our recent demonstrations of 200 Gbps short-reach transmissions with 4-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and discrete multitone signals are also presented as examples to show the system requirements in terms of device characteristics and DSP performance. Apart from digital coherent technologies and advanced direct detection systems, such as Stokes-vector and Kramers-Kronig schemes, we expect high-speed IM/DD systems will remain advantageous in terms of system cost, power consumption, and footprint for short reach applications in the short- to mid- term perspective.
Future generations of wireless communication systems are expected to support orders of magnitude faster data transfer with much lower latency than the currently deployed solutions. Development of ...wireless transceivers of higher bandwidth, low energy consumption, and small footprint becomes challenging with radio frequency (RF) electronic technologies. Photonics‐assisted technologies show many advantages in generating signals of ultrabroad bandwidth at high carrier frequencies in the millimeter‐wave, terahertz, and IR bands. Among these frequency options, the mid‐IR band has recently attracted great interest for future wireless communication due to its intrinsic merits of low propagation loss and high tolerance of atmospheric perturbations. A promising source for mid‐IR free‐space communications is the semiconductor quantum cascade laser (QCL), which can be directly modulated at a high speed and facilitates monolithic integration for compact transceivers. Herein, the research and development of QCL‐based free‐space communications are reviewed and a recent experimental study of multi‐gigabit transmission with a directly modulated mid‐IR QCL and a commercial off‐the‐shelf IR photodetector is reported on. Up to 4 Gb s−1 transmission of two advanced modulation formats, namely, four‐level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM‐4) and discrete multitone (DMT) modulation, is demonstrated.
The properties of quantum cascade lasers (QCLs) make them promising sources for future free‐space optical communications (FSOC). Herein, the research status of QCL‐based FSOC is reviewed and a 4 Gb s−1 transmission with a 4.65 μm QCL is reported. Two modulation formats, namely, four‐level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM‐4) and discrete multitone (DMT), are evaluated and compared.
Coherent communication networks are based on the ability to use multiple dimensions of the lightwave together with electrical domain compensation of transmission impairments. Electrical-domain ...dispersion compensation (EDC) provides many advantages such as network flexibility and enhanced fiber nonlinearity tolerance, but makes the system more susceptible to laser frequency noise (FN), e.g. to the local oscillator FN in systems with post-reception EDC. Although this problem has been extensively studied, statistically, for links assuming lasers with white-FN, many questions remain unanswered. Particularly, the influence of a realistic non-white FN-spectrum due to e.g., the presence of 1/f-flicker and carrier induced noise remains elusive and a statistical analysis becomes insufficient. Here we provide an experimentally validated theory for coherent optical links with lasers having general non-white FN-spectrum and EDC. The fundamental reason of the increased susceptibility is shown to be FN-induced symbol displacement that causes timing jitter and/or inter/intra symbol interference. We establish that different regimes of the laser FN-spectrum cause a different set of impairments. The influence of the impairments due to some regimes can be reduced by optimizing the corresponding mitigation algorithms, while other regimes cause irretrievable impairments. Theoretical boundaries of these regimes and corresponding criteria applicable to system/laser design are provided.
Forward error correction (FEC) codes combined with high-order modulator formats, i.e., coded modulation (CM), are essential in optical communication networks to achieve highly efficient and reliable ...communication. The task of providing additional error control in the design of CM systems with high-performance requirements remains urgent. As an additional control of CM systems, we propose to use indivisible error detection codes based on a positional number system. In this work, we evaluated the indivisible code using the average probability method (APM) for the binary symmetric channel (BSC), which has the simplicity, versatility and reliability of the estimate, which is close to reality. The APM allows for evaluation and compares indivisible codes according to parameters of correct transmission, and detectable and undetectable errors. Indivisible codes allow for the end-to-end (E2E) control of the transmission and processing of information in digital systems and design devices with a regular structure and high speed. This study researched a fractal decoder device for additional error control, implemented in field-programmable gate array (FPGA) software with FEC for short-reach optical interconnects with multilevel pulse amplitude (PAM-M) modulated with Gray code mapping. Indivisible codes with natural redundancy require far fewer hardware costs to develop and implement encoding and decoding devices with a sufficiently high error detection efficiency. We achieved a reduction in hardware costs for a fractal decoder by using the fractal property of the indivisible code from 10% to 30% for different
while receiving the reciprocal of the golden ratio.
Error vector magnitude (EVM) is a metric for assessing the quality of m-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (mQAM) signals. Recently proposed deep learning techniques, e.g., feedforward neural ...networks (FFNNs) -based EVM estimation scheme leverage fast signal quality monitoring in coherent optical communication systems. Such a scheme estimates EVM from amplitude histograms (AHs) of short signal sequences captured before carrier phase recovery (CPR). In this work, we explore further complexity reduction by proposing a simple linear regression (LR) -based EVM monitoring method. We systematically compare the performance of the proposed method with the FFNN-based scheme and demonstrate its capability to infer EVM from an AH when the modulation format information is known in advance. We perform both simulation and experiment to show that the LR-based EVM estimation method achieves a comparable accuracy as the FFNN-based scheme. The technique can be embedded with modulation format identification modules to provide comprehensive signal information. Therefore, this work paves the way to design a fast-learning scheme with parsimony as a future intelligent OPM enabler.
The article analyzes the total cost of ownership (TCO) of 5G fronthauling solutions based on analog and digital radio-over-fiber (RoF) architectures in cloud radio access networks (C-RANs). The ...capital and operational expenditures (CAPEX, OPEX) are assessed, for a 10-year period, considering three different RoF techniques: intermediate frequency analog RoF (IF-A-RoF), digital signal processing (DSP) assisted analog RoF (DSP-A-RoF), and digital RoF (D-RoF) based on the common public radio interface (CPRI) specifications. The greenfield deployment scenario under exam includes both fiber trenching (FT) and fiber leasing (FL) options. The TCO is assessed while varying (i) the number of aggregated subcarriers, (ii) the number of three-sector antennas located at the base station, and (iii) the mean fiber-hop length. The comparison highlights the significance that subcarrier aggregation has on the cost efficiency of the analog RoF solutions. In addition, the analysis details the contribution of each cost category to the overall CAPEX and OPEX values. The obtained results indicate that subcarrier aggregation via DSP results in high cost efficiency for a mobile fronthaul network, while a CPRI-based architecture together with FL brings the highest OPEX value.
We experimentally evaluate the high-speed on–off keying (OOK) and four-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM4) transmitter’s performance in C-band for short-reach optical interconnects. We ...demonstrate up to 100 Gbaud OOK and PAM4 transmission over a 400 m standard single-mode fiber with a monolithically integrated externally modulated laser (EML) having 100 GHz 3 dB bandwidth with 2 dB ripple. We evaluate its capabilities to enable 800 GbE client-side links based on eight, and even four, optical lanes for optical interconnect applications. We study the equalizer’s complexity when increasing the baud rate of PAM4 signals. Furthermore, we extend our work with numerical simulations showing the required received optical power (ROP) for a certain bit error rate (BER) for the different combinations of the effective number of bits (ENOB) and extinction ratio (ER) at the transmitter. We also show a possibility to achieve around 1 km dispersion uncompensated transmission with a simple decision feedback equalizer (DFE) for a 100 Gbaud OOK, PAM4, and eight-level PAM (PAM8) link having the received power penalty of around 1 dB.
Space-division multiplexing (SDM) attracts attention to cladding-pumped optical amplifiers, but they suffer from a low pump power conversion efficiency. To address this issue, ytterbium (Yb3+) and ...erbium (Er3+) co-doping is considered as an effective approach. However, it changes the gain profile of Er3+-doped fiber amplifiers and induces the gain difference between optical wavelengths in the C-band, significantly limiting the effective band of the dense wavelength-division multiplexed (DWDM) system. This paper is devoted to a detailed study of a cladding-pumped Er3+/Yb3+ co-doped fiber amplifier (EYDFA) through numerical simulations aiming to identify a configuration, before assembling a similar EYDFA in our laboratory premises that ensures the desired performance. The simulation model is based on a commercial double cladding EYDF whose parameters are experimentally extracted and fed to the EYDFA setup for the system-level studies. We investigate the wavelength dependence of the amplifier’s characteristics (absolute gain, gain uniformity, noise figure) and bit error rate (BER) performance for several DWDM channels and their optical power. The obtained results show that a 7 m long EYDF and co-propagating pump direction is preferable for the EYDFA with a 3 W pump source at 975 nm and with the given gain medium characteristics for WDM applications. For instance, it ensures a gain of 19.7–28.3 dB and a noise figure of 3.7–4.2 dB when amplifying 40 DWDM channels with the input power of −20 dBm per channel. Besides, we study EYDFA gain bandwidth and the maximum output power when operating close to the saturation regime and perform a sensitivity analysis showing how the doped fiber’s absorption and emission cross-sections impact the amplification process through energy transfer from Yb3+ to Er3+. Finally, we quantify the power penalty introduced by the EYDFA; the results show that it is not higher than 0.1 dB when amplifying 40 × 10 Gbps non-return-to-zero on-off keying signals from −20 dBm/channel.
While infrastructure providers are expanding their portfolio to offer sustainable solutions for beyond 10 Gbps in the access segment of optical networks, we experimentally compare several modulation ...format alternatives for future passive optical networks (PONs) aiming to deliver 25+ Gbps net-rates. As promising candidates, we consider the intensity modulation direct detection (IM/DD) schemes such as electrical duobinary (EDB) and 4-level and 8-level pulse amplitude modulations (PAM-4/8). They are more spectrally efficient than the conventional non-return-to-zero on-off-keying (NRZ-OOK) used in current 10G PONs. As we move to higher rates, digital equalization enhances the performance by smoothening the systems imperfection. However, the impact that such equalization has on the optical power budget remains unclear. Therefore, in this article, we fairly compare the optical power budget values of a time division multiplexed PON (TDM-PON) exploiting a linear digital signal equalization at the receiver side. We consider the conventional PON configuration (20 km of single-mode fiber (SMF), 1:N optical power splitting) with IM/DD and net-rates above 25 Gbps. Furthermore, we focus on a downstream transmission imposing the bandwidth limitations of 10G components using a digital filter before the detection. The obtained results show that the use of a digital post-equalization with 43 feed-forward (FF) and 21 feedback (FB) taps can significantly improve the signal quality enabling new alternatives and enhancing the optical power budget.