20-Gbps WDM-PON transmissions employing weak-resonant-cavity FPLD with OFDM and SC-FDE modulation formats

Using a colorless weak-resonant-cavity (WRC) FPLD injected by a centralized light source, we have experimentally demonstrated a superior performance of 20-Gbps uplink transmission in a WDM-PON. Even though the typical modulation bandwidth of a WRC-FPLD is only similar to 1.25 GHz, using spectrally-efficient 32-QAM OFDM or SC-FDE modulation, 20-Gbps uplink signals can achieve the FEC limit after 25-km dispersion-uncompensated single-mode fiber transmission. Because of the advantage of lower PAPR, the SC-FDE signals outperform the OFDM signals with the fixed 32-QAM format in the proposed system; moreover, SC-FDE scheme can be another promising candidate for uplinks in WDM-PONs, for its simplification to ONUs. The signal at the mode of 1560.7 nm shows similar quality with the signal at the modes of 1545.3 nm and 1574.7 nm, the WRC-FPLD, accordingly, has wide injection wavelength range from at least 1545.3 nm to 1574.7 nm. With the mode spacing of 0.55 nm, consequently, we have demonstrated the applicability of the colorless WRC-FPLD on supporting up to 36 channels in the WDM-PON. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America