Experimental Demonstration of Constant-Envelope OFDM to Reduce Intermodulation Impairments and Increase Robustness Against Fiber Nonlinearities

Direct detection optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DDO-OFDM) systems have been proposed as a well-suited solution for cost-sensitive applications, but also for metro/regional optical links. In this article, we experimentally demonstrate tolerance enhancements of constant-envelope OFDM (CE-OFDM) signals towards Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) intermodulation impairments and fiber nonlinear Kerr effects. The additional tolerance is achieved by the reduced peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of CE-OFDM signals, unlike conventional OFDM signals that inherently possess high PAPR values and therefore, are prone to distortions induced by the above-mentioned impairments. The experiments show that the transmission of CE-OFDM signals with PAPR =3 dB over 1000 km of dispersion-uncompensated standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) is successfully accomplished. The proper choice of the MZM bias point, as well as the electrical phase modulation index, provides link length enlargements at the same bit error rate. An enlargement around 320 km of SSMF was achieved with an optical launch power of 10 dBm and with a guard-band of ≈16% of the signal bandwidth when compared to conventional DDO-OFDM systems.