107 Gb/s coherent optical OFDM transmission

over 1000-km SSMF fiber using orthogonal

band multiplexing
W. Shieh, Q. Yang, and Y. Ma
ARC Special Research Centre for Ultra-Broadband Information Networks and National ICT Australia
Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC 3010, Australia
e-mail: w.shieh@ee.unimelb.edu.au

Abstract: Coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) has emerged as an

attractive modulation format for the forthcoming 100 Gb/s Ethernet.
However, even the spectral-efficient implementation of CO-OFDM requires
digital-to-analog converters (DAC) and analog-to-digital converters (ADC)
to operate at the bandwidth which may not be available today or may not be
cost-effective. In order to resolve the electronic bandwidth bottleneck
associated with DAC/ADC devices, we propose and elucidate the principle
of orthogonal-band-multiplexed OFDM (OBM-OFDM) to subdivide the
entire OFDM spectrum into multiple orthogonal bands. With this scheme,
the DAC/ADCs do not need to operate at extremely high sampling rate. The
corresponding mapping to the mixed-signal integrated circuit (IC) design is
also revealed. Additionally, we show the proof-of-concept transmission
experiment through optical realization of OBM-OFDM. To the best of our
knowledge, we present the first experimental demonstration of 107 Gb/s
QPSK-encoded CO-OFDM signal transmission over 1000 km standardsingle-mode-fiber (SSMF) without optical dispersion compensation and
without Raman amplification. The demonstrated system employs 2x2
MIMO-OFDM signal processing and achieves high electrical spectral
efficiency with direct-conversion at both transmitter and receiver.
2008 Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: (060.1660) Coherent communications; (0606.5060) Phase modulation

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1. Introduction
Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has emerged to be the leading
modulation technology for the wireless and wireline systems in RF domain, and has been
incorporated into many communications standards such as IEEE 802.11 a/g. OFDM transmits
data through many parallel orthogonal subcarriers, and provides channel equalization with a
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relatively simple solution in frequency-domain that would be otherwise quite complex with
the conventional time-domain equalization. Recently, there have been intense research
interests in applying OFDM to optical communications. Optical OFDM (O-OFDM) has
shown extreme robustness to fiber chromatic dispersion [ 1 - 5 ] and polarization mode
dispersion (PMD) [6-12]. The O-OFDM has additional advantage of achieving high spectral
efficiency using higher-order modulation [13-14] enabling dynamic data rate adaptation. The
maximum transmission rate demonstrated so far for coherent optical OFDM (CO-OFDM) is
52.5 Gb/s [11]. Even with bandwidth efficient direct-conversion architecture in transmitter
and receiver [4,10], the electrical bandwidth required for 107 Gb/s would still be about 15
GHz. The best commercial DACs/ADCs in silicon integrated circuit (IC) are only run at a
bandwidth of 6 GHz [ 15 ], indicating that to realize 100 Gb/s CO-OFDM directly is
challenging in a cost-effective manner. To overcome this electrical bandwidth bottleneck
associated with DAC/ADC devices, we propose and demonstrate 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM
systems using the concept of orthogonal band multiplexing to divide the entire OFDM
spectrum into multiple orthogonal bands. These multiple OFDM bands with small or zero
frequency guard band can be multiplexed and de-multiplexed without inter-band interference
due to inter-band orthogonality. With this scheme, a 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM signal is
transmitted through 1000-km (10 x 100 km) standard-single-mode-fiber (SSMF) using only
EDFA (non-Raman amplification) and achieves a Q factor of 11.5 dB, without optical
dispersion compensation and without a need for a polarization controller at the receiver.
Although transmission at 100 Gb/s and above has been demonstrated at longer distance
relying on dispersion compensation module and Raman Amplification (RA) in each span [1619 ], our work has achieved the first 1000-km transmission without optical dispersion
compensation and without RA beyond 100 Gb/s. The OBM-OFDM has two distinct
advantages: (i) with band orthogonality, the spectral efficiency is improved by allowing for
zero or small guard band, and (ii) OBM-OFDM offers the flexibility of demodulating two
OFDM subbands simultaneously with just one FFT whereas three (I)FFTs would be otherwise
needed for the same purpose. It is noted that the two-band subcarrier multiplexed OFDM was
used in [11], but without orthogonality between OFDM bands. Another major difference from
[11] is that we propose a systematic band structure in both transmitter and receiver to resolve
ADC/DAC bandwidth bottleneck. Especially upon reception, the OBM-OFDM signal is
demonstrated to be partitioned into multiple bands using anti-alias filters such that a relatively
low speed 20 GS/s ADC is used to receive 100 Gb/s OFDM, compared with using a 50 GS/s
ADC for 50 Gb/s OFDM in [11]. Subcarrier multiplexing for optical communications has also
been discussed in [3, 20 ] with direct-detection and without invoking the orthogonality
between the subcarriers or OFDM bands.
We would emphasize that the main motivation of this work is the electronic realization of
OBM-OFDM to achieve a CMOS-friendly mixed-signal IC solution for a 100 Gb/s OFDM
transceiver. Nevertheless, it is instructive to point out that optical realization of OBM-OFDM
serves as an alternative to the other spectral efficient multiplexing schemes including coherent
WDM [21], all-optical OFDM [19], electro-optically subcarrier-multiplexed OFDM [22], and
orthogonal WDM [23]. In particular, [19] and [22] have shown 100 Gb/s OFDM experimental
transmission with direct-detection. The difference of our work lies in that the basic processing
or multiplexing element for OBM-OFDM is a multi-carrier OFDM signal (or band) whereas
for the above-mentioned four schemes is a single-carrier signal. The consequences are that (i)
for OBM-OFDM, a cyclic prefix is used to ease the tight bit-level synchronization constraint,
(ii) for OBM-OFDM, the efficient (I)FFT is conveniently used for modulation and
demodulation, and (iii) the OFDM band spectrum is inherently more tightly-bounded than the
single-carrier counterpart, and is readily partitioned with electrical anti-alias filters, and
subsequently processed with lower-speed DAC/ADCs. Finally, the proposed OBM-OFDM
should not be confused with the multi-band OFDM (MB-OFDM) currently pursued by multiband OFDM alliance (MBOA) for the ultra-wide band (UWB) systems [24]. In MB-OFDM,
only one band is transmitted at any point of the time as a means of achieving frequency

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diversity and multiple access whereas in OBM-OFDM, multiple bands are transmitted
simultaneously.
2. Principle of orthogonal-band-multiplexed OFDM (OBM-OFDM)
The principle of the OBM-OFDM is to divide the entire OFDM spectrum into multiple
orthogonal OFDM (sub) bands. As shown in Fig. 1, the entire OFDM spectrum comprises N
OFDM bands, each with the subcarrier spacing of f , and band frequency guard spacing of
f G . The subcarrier spacing f is identical for each band due to using the same sampling
clock within one circuit. The orthogonal condition between the different bands is given by

fG = mf

(1)

that is, the guard band is multiple (m times) of subcarrier spacing. This is to guarantee that
each OFDM band is an orthogonal extension of another. As such, the orthogonality condition
is satisfied not only for the subcarriers inside each band, but it is also satisfied for any two
subcarriers from different bands, for instance, fi from band 1 and fj from band 2 are
orthogonal to each other (Fig. 1), despite the fact that they originate from different bands. The
interesting scenario is that m equals to 1 in (1) such that the OFDM bands can be
multiplexed/de-multiplexed even without guard band. We call this method of sub-dividing
OFDM spectrum into multiple orthogonal bands orthogonal-band-multiplexed OFDM
(OBM-OFDM). An identical bandwidth-efficient multiplexing scheme for CO-OFDM has
been first proposed in [25] where it is called cross-channel OFDM (XC-OFDM). We adopt
the term of OBM-OFDM to stress the bandwidth reduction through sub-banding of the OFDM
spectrum.
Anti-alias Filter II

Band 1

f fG

Complete OFDM Spectrum

Band 2

Anti-alias Filter I

Band N-1

Band 3

Band N

..

fi

fj

Frequency

Fig. 1. Conceptual diagram of orthogonal-band-multiplexed OFDM (OBM-OFDM). Anti-alias

filters I and II correspond to two detection approaches illustrated in the text.

Upon reception, each OFDM (sub)band can be de-multiplexed using an anti-alias filter
slightly wider than the bands to be detected. Fig. 1 shows two approaches for OBM-OFDM
detections. The first approach is to tune the receiver laser to the center of each band, and use
an anti-alias filter I that low-pass only one-band RF signal, such that each band is detected
separately. The second-approach is to tune the receive laser to the center of the guard band,
and use an anti-alias filter II that low-pass two-band RF signal such that two bands are
detected simultaneously. In either case, the inter-band interference is avoided because of the
orthogonality between the neighboring bands, despite the leakage of the subcarriers from
neighboring bands. By using OBM-OFDM, CO-OFDM at 107 Gb/s can be realized without
forcing the DAC/ADC devices to operate at the extremely high sampling rate.
Figures 2(a)-(c) show the conceptual diagrams for implementing the OBM-OFDM using
mixed-signal circuit. In Fig. 2(a), each OFDM baseband transmitter is implemented using
digital IC design. The subsequent up-conversion, band-filtering and RF amplification can be
implemented in RF IC design. The output of the OFDM baseband transmitter will be filtered
through an anti-alias filter and up-convert to appropriate RF band with the center frequency
from f1 to fN using an IQ modulator or a complex multiplexer, the structure of which is shown
in Fig. 2(c). The range of f1 to fN is centered around zero, given by

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(b)

(a)
OFDM Baseband
Transmitter 1

exp ( j 2 f1t )

exp ( j 2 f1t )

OFDM Baseband
Transmitter 2

OFDM Baseband
Receiver 2

OBM-OFDM
Signal

exp ( j 2 f 2 t )

..

..

exp ( j 2 f 2 t )

OBM-OFDM
Signal

OFDM Baseband
Receiver 1

OFDM Baseband
Transmitter N

exp ( j 2 f N t )

exp ( j 2 f N t )

OFDM Baseband
Receiver N

cos ( 2 ft )

(c)

IQ Modulator/
Demodulator

cos ( 2 ft )

cos ( 2 ft )

Re(c)

Im(c)

exp ( j 2 f t )

I=Re(z)

Im(c)

Re(c)

sin ( 2 ft )

z = c exp ( j 2 f t )

I=Re(z)
Q=Im(z)

sin ( 2 ft )

sin ( 2 ft )

Fig. 2. Schematic of OBM-OFDM implementation in mixed-signal circuits for (a) the

transmitter, (b) the receiver, and (c) the IQ modulator/demodulator. Both the output from the
transmitter in (a) and the input to the receiver in (b) are complex signals with real and
imaginary components.

fl = l f b ,

l [ L, L ]

(2)

where fl is the center frequency of the lth OFDM band, f b is the band spacing, L is the
maximum of the band number. The output of each IQ modulator is a complex value that has
real and imaginary parts as shown in Fig. 2(c). These complex signals are further summed up
at the output, namely, real and imaginary parts are added up in separate parallel paths. The
combined complex OFDM signal will be used to drive an optical IQ modulator to be upconverted to optical domain [25-26]. We note that the negative and positive bands differ only
in the sign of quadrature oscillator sin ( 2 ft ) , and subsequently can be combined and
implemented with one complex multiplexer by the same up conversion frequency. However,
the baseband input ports need simple modifications to include the two bands that are of
mirror-image with each other. At the receive end ( Fig. 2(b) ), the incoming signal is split into
multiple sub bands and down-converted to baseband using IQ demodulators. Anti-alias filters
should be used to remove unwanted high frequency components at the output of the
demodulators. Again similar to the transmitter, the negative and positive bands can be either
down-converted separately using a separate complex mixer, or using the same mixer which
separates positive and negative bands. It follows that the DAC/ADC only needs to operate at
the bandwidth of each OFDM band, which is approximately scaled down by a factor equal to
the number of sub bands from the original complete OFDM spectrum. For instance, if the
number of sub bands is five, each OFDM band will only need to cover about 7 GHz optical
bandwidth for 107 Gb/s data rate with QPSK modulation and polarization multiplexing. The
electrical bandwidth required is 3.5 GHz, or half of the OFDM band spectrum by using directconversion at transmit and receive. The ADC/DAC with bandwidth of 3.5 GHz can be
implemented in todays technology [15] and using a wider bandwidth for each OFDM band
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will reduce the number of the OFDM bands further down to two or three. Subsequently, the
architecture shown in Figs. 2(a) and 2(b) are feasible for implementation in mixed-signal
CMOS ICs. It is also noted that the number of transmitter bands and receiver bands do not
need to be same, as illustrated in Fig. 2 in which two receiver band partitions are shown
reflected by two different anti-alias filters used.
3. Experimental setup and description
Polarization Diversity Coherent Receiver
Through Recirculation Loop

AWG

Optical
Hybrid

10 MHz
I

Synthesizer

1000 km

PS
PM

PBS
Optical I/Q
Modulator

BR2

PBS LD2

PBC

I
Q

LD1
IM

BR1

Optical
Optical
Hybrid
Hybrid

BR3

TDS

I
Q

BR4

One Symbol Delay

IM: Intensity Modulator PM: Phase modulator PS: Phase Shifter AWG: Arbitrary Waveform Generator LD: Laser Diode
BR: Balanced Receiver TDS: Time-domain Sampling Scope PBS/C: Polarization Splitter/Combiner

Fig.3. Experimental setup for 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM systems.

The OBM-OFDM could be realized using either subcarrier multiplexing [5] or wavelength
multiplexing to patch multiple orthogonal bands into a complete OFDM spectrum (Fig. 1).
The transmission performance such as OSNR sensitivity, nonlinearity, and phase noise impact
are independent of the means of OBM-OFDM. Although the future of the 107 Gb/s OBMOFDM implementation will be in the form of electronic mixed signal IC as shown in Fig. 2.
We choose optical multiplexing to obtain OBM-OFDM for proof-of-concept demonstration
without affecting our investigation of 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM transmission performance. Fig. 3
shows the experimental setup for the 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM transmission. The multi-frequency
(five tones to be exact) optical source spaced at 7.5 GHz is generated using cascaded intensity
modulator and phase modulator architecture [27]. The tone spacing and arbitrary waveform
generator (AWG) sampling clock are locked by a frequency standard of 10 MHz from the
synthesizer. The OFDM signal in each individual band is generated by using a Tektronix
Arbitrary Waveform Generator (AWG). The time domain OFDM waveform is first generated
with a Matlab program with the parameters as follows: total number of subcarriers is 128 with
QPSK encoding, guard interval is 1/8 of the observation period, middle 87 subcarriers out of
128 are filled, from which 10 pilot subcarriers are used for phase estimation. The real and
imaginary parts of the OFDM waveforms are uploaded into the AWG operated at 10 GS/s to
generate two analog signals, which are then fed into I and Q ports of an optical I/Q modulator,
to impress the baseband OFDM signal onto five optical tones. The optical output of the I/Q
modulator consists of five-band OBM-OFDM signals, each band carrying 10.7 Gb/s.
Although the five bands are filled with the same data, this will not affect the performance of
the system studied and our subsequent conclusion. Unlike conventional link design, no
dispersion compensation module is used in our transmission experiment, leading to fast phase
walk-off and de-correlation between neighboring bands. The system performance we
investigate here should be a good representation of the scenario for which each band is filled
with independent data. This is verified through simulation that shows the Q penalty difference
should be less than 0.4 dB.
The optical OFDM signal from the I/Q modulator is then split into two branches that are
delay-mismatched by one OFDM symbol period (14.4 ns), and then combined. This is to
emulate the polarization diversity transmitter with data rate of 21.4 Gb/s per band. The two
polarization components are completely independent due to the delay of 14.4 ns for each
OFDM symbol. The signal is further input into a recirculation loop comprising 100-km fiber
and an EDFA to compensate the loss. The signal is coupled out from the loop and received
with a polarization diversity coherent receiver [7,11] comprising a receive laser, a polarization
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beam splitter, two hybrids and four balanced receivers. The receive laser is tuned to the center
of each band, and the RF signals from the four balanced detectors first pass through the antialias filters I with a low pass bandwidth of 3.8 GHz, such that each band is measured
independently (this is the first approach with 21.4 Gb/s per detection described in Section 2).
The RF signals are then input into a Tektronix Time Domain-sampling Scope (TDS), acquired
at 20 GS/s, and processed with a Matlab program using 2x2 MIMO-OFDM models. The 2x2
MIMO-OFDM signal processing involves [10-11] (1) FFT window synchronization using
Schmidl format to identify the start of the OFDM symbol, (2) software estimation and
compensation of the frequency offset, (3) channel estimation in terms of Jones Matrix H, (4)
phase estimation for each OFDM symbol, and (5) constellation construction for each carrier
and BER computation. The channel matrix H is estimated by sending 30 OFDM symbols
using alternative polarization launch. The total number of OFDM symbols evaluated is 1000.
The measurements of low BER in the order of 10-5 are run multiple times. In practice, the
training sequence for channel estimation is only used in the acquisition phase, and will not be
repeated in the subsequent OFDM blocks and thus is not counted as an overhead. After
completion of acquisition, the channel estimation can be performed through pilot subcarriers
or decision-feedback.
4. Experimental results and discussion

(b)

(a)

OFDM Spectrum (~ 37 GHz)

345

10
dB

-30

20

-10

0
10
Frequency (GHz)

20

30

Wavelength (nm)

Fig.4. Optical Spectra for the 107 Gb/s signal using (a) a polarization diversity coherent
receiver, and (b) using an optical spectrum analyzer. The resolution bandwidths in (a) and (b)
are100 kHz, and 2.5 GHz (0.02 nm), respectively. The band numbers are also depicted next to
the corresponding bands.
10
dB

-10

-8

-6

-4

-2

0
2
4
Frequency (GHz)

10

Fig.5. The electrical spectrum at the receiver after the 3.8 GHz anti-alias filter. Both negative
and positive frequency components are shown because the coherent receiver is used.

Figure 4(a) shows the optical spectrum after 1000-km transmission measured with the
polarization diversity coherent receiver shown in Fig. 3. It can be seen that five OFDM bands
spaced at 7.5 GHz with guard band about 625 MHz (m=8). The entire OFDM spectrum
occupies about 37 GHz and rolls off rapidly at the edge. The out-band components are due to
the multi-frequency source generation not tightly bounded at 5 tones. This artifact will not
exist in the real application using either subcarrier multiplexing or optical multiplexing OBMOFDM. Fig. 4(b) shows the zoom-out optical spectrum using an optical spectrum analyzer.
The m of 8 is chosen for convenience. We have conducted a detailed experiment on the

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system performance as a function of m, which shows the validity of orthogonal condition (Eq.
1). The result will be made known in a separate submission.
Figure 5 shows the detected electrical spectrum after using a 3.8 GHz electrical anti-alias
filter. This is equivalent to placing a 7.6 GHz optical band-pass filter centered around each
OFDM band. The anti-alias filter is critical for OBM-OFDM implementation. As is shown in
Fig. 4(a), without electrical anti-alias filter, the electrical spectrum will be as broad as 15 GHz
(which is the photodetector bandwidth). Such a broach spectrum will have alias effect if
sampled at 20 GS/s, indicating that at least 30 GS/s ADC has to be used. However, the filtered
spectrum in Fig. 5 can be easily sampled with 20 GS/s, or even at a lower speed of 10 GS/s.
Additionally, despite the fact that there are some spurious components from neighboring band
that is leaked at the edge of the 3.5 GHz filter, since they are orthogonal subcarriers to the
interested OFDM subcarriers at the center, they do not contribute to the interference
degradation. Some unexpected discrete tones are also shown outside of the pass band, which
may be due to the sub-harmonics of clock frequency inside the TDS. Nevertheless, they are
too weak to cause any detrimental effects.
Tables 1(a) and 1(b) show the performance of five bands at both back-to-back and 1000km transmission. It can be seen that both polarizations in each band can be recovered
successfully, and this is done without a need for a polarization controller at receive. At the
reach of 1000 km, all the sub-bands BER are better than 10-3. The difference of BER in each
entry is attributed to the tone power imbalance and instability as well as the receiver
imbalance for two polarizations.
Table 1. BER distribution for OFDM sub-bands, when (a) OSNR of 17.5 dB at back-to-back,
and (b) OSNR of 20.2 dB after 1000 km transmission.
(a)

Band

BER (x polarization)
BER (y polarization)

9.8 10

2
4

3
4

4
5

1.2 10 1.3 10

4 10

(b)

5
5

8.2 10

2.1 103 1.2 104 2.7 105 1.3 105 1.3 103

Band

BER (x polarization)
BER (y polarization)

4.1 10

2
4

3
4

4.5 10 9.6 10

4
5

5
5

1.4 10 7.8 10 4

6.8 105 1.2 104 4.2 10 4.2 104 7.1 104

Figure 6 shows the BER sensitivity performance for the entire 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM
signal at the back-to-back and 1000-km transmission with the launch power of -1 dBm. The
BER is counted across all five bands and two polarizations. The inset shows the clear
constellation at 1000 km with an OSNR of 20.2 dB. The OSNR required for a BER of 10-3 is
respectively 17.0 dB and 19.2 dB for back-to-back and 1000-km transmission. Fig. 7 shows
the system Q performance of the 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM signal as a function of reach up to 1000
km. The optimal launch power for all reaches is around -1 dBm. The Q above 12.5 dB is
estimated with an electrical SNR corresponding to the subcarrier symbol spread in the
constellation diagram (Eq. 8 in [28 ]). It can be seen that the Q decreases from 16 dB to 11.5
dB when the reach increases from back-to-back to 1000 km. The Q disparity between two
polarizations is attributed to the polarization diversity detector imbalance. We note that this is
the first 107 Gb/s transmission over 1000 km SSMF fiber without using optical dispersion
compensation module and without Raman amplification, in either single-carrier or multicarrier format, to the best of our knowledge.

BER

1.0E-01

Constellation at 1000 km

1.0E-02
1.0E-03
Back-to-back

1.0E-04

1000-km

1.0E-05
10

15

20
OSNR(dB)

25

30

Fig. 6. BER sensitivity of 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM signal at the back-to-back and 1000-km
transmission.

#92711 - $15.00 USD

(C) 2008 OSA

Received 19 Feb 2008; revised 8 Apr 2008; accepted 14 Apr 2008; published 21 Apr 2008

28 April 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 9 / OPTICS EXPRESS 6385

Q (dB)

18
X Polarization

16

Y Polarization

14
12
10
0

200

400

600

800

1000

Tranmission Distance (km)

Fig. 7. Q factor of 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM signal as a function of reach.

5. Conclusion
We have proposed and elucidated the principle of orthogonal-band-multiplexed OFDM
(OBM-OFDM) to subdivide the entire OFDM spectrum into multiple orthogonal bands. As a
result, the DAC/ADCs do not need to operate at extremely high sampling rate. The
corresponding mapping to the mixed-signal integrated circuit (IC) design is also revealed.
Additionally, we show the proof-of-concept transmission experiment through optical
realization of OBM-OFDM. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first experimental
demonstration of 107 Gb/s CO-OFDM signal transmission over 1000 km standard-singlemode-fiber (SSMF) without optical dispersion compensation and without Raman
amplification. The demonstrated system employs 2x2 MIMO-OFDM signal processing and
achieves high electrical spectral efficiency with direct-conversion at both transmitter and
receiver.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC).

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#92711 - $15.00 USD

(C) 2008 OSA

Received 19 Feb 2008; revised 8 Apr 2008; accepted 14 Apr 2008; published 21 Apr 2008

28 April 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 9 / OPTICS EXPRESS 6386