Optical and RF Metrology for 5G

Specification standards will soon be available for 5G mobile RF communications. What optical and electrical metrology is needed or available to support the development of the supporting optical communication systems? Device measurement, digital oscilloscope impairments and improving system resolution are discussed.Comment: 2017 IEEE Photonics Society Summer Topical Meeting Series (SUM

Mask testing of 28 gbaud 16-QAM transmitters using time-resolved error vector magnitude

We propose time-resolved EVM for characterization of 16-QAM transmitters. By designing a mask test, different impairments can be separated and quantified. The impact from quadrature error and timing skew are investigated experimentally

Comb-based WDM transmission at 10 Tbit/s using a DC-driven quantum-dash mode-locked laser diode

Chip-scale frequency comb generators have the potential to become key building blocks of compact wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) transceivers in future metropolitan or campus-area networks. Among the various comb generator concepts, quantum-dash (QD) mode-locked laser diodes (MLLD) stand out as a particularly promising option, combining small footprint with simple operation by a DC current and offering flat broadband comb spectra. However, the data transmission performance achieved with QD-MLLD was so far limited by strong phase noise of the individual comb tones, restricting experiments to rather simple modulation formats such as quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) or requiring hard-ware-based compensation schemes. Here we demonstrate that these limitations can be over-come by digital symbol-wise phase tracking algorithms, avoiding any hardware-based phase-noise compensation. We demonstrate 16QAM dual-polarization WDM transmission on 38 channels at an aggregate net data rate of 10.68 Tbit/s over 75 km of standard single-mode fiber. To the best of our knowledge, this corresponds to the highest data rate achieved through a DC-driven chip-scale comb generator without any hardware-based phase-noise reduction schemes

Robust single polarization coherent transceiver using DGD pre-distortion for optical access networks

DGD pre-distortion implements a polarization time code enabling a single polarization coherent transceiver to recover the signal for all polarization states. Using a DFE the maximum polarization dependent sensitivity variation is 1.9/3.0dB for BPSK/QPSK respectively

Spectrally-efficient high-speed wireless bridge operating at 250 GHz

A photonic wireless bridge operating at 250 GHz is presented. Using a pilot tone-assisted phase noise compensation technique, a data rate of 40 Gbit/s is achieved using 16-quadrature amplitude modulation. Furthermore, the wireless bridge is also demonstrated in a wavelength division multiplexing scenario

Pilot-tone assisted 16-QAM photonic wireless bridge operating at 250 GHz

A photonic wireless bridge operating at a carrier frequency of 250 GHz is proposed and demonstrated. To mitigate the phase noise of the free-running lasers present in such a link, the tone-assisted carrier recovery is used. Compared to the blind phase noise compensation (PNC) algorithm, this technique exhibited penalties of 0.15 dB and 0.46 dB when used with aggregated Lorentzian linewidths of 28 kHz and 359 kHz, respectively, and 20 GBd 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals. The wireless bridge is also demonstrated in a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) scenario, where 5 optical channels are generated and sent to the Tx remote antenna unit (RAU). In this configuration, the full band from 224 GHz to 294 GHz is used. Finally, a 50 Gbit/s transmission is achieved with the proposed wireless bridge in single channel configuration. The wireless transmission distance is limited to 10 cm due to the low power emitted by the uni-travelling carrier photodiode used in the experiments. However, link budget calculations based on state-of-the-art THz technology show that distances >1000 m can be achieved with this approach.Comment: 13 pages, in Journal of Lightwave Technolog

Low-complexity and phase noise tolerant carrier phase estimation for dual-polarization 16-QAM systems

A low-complexity feed-forward carrier phase estimation (CPE) technique is presented for dual-polarization (DP)-16-QAM transmission systems. By combining QPSK partitioning, maximum likelihood (ML) detection and phase offset estimation between signals in different polarizations, simulation and experimental results for a 200Gb/s DP-16-QAM system demonstrate similar linewidth tolerance to the best feedforward CPE reported to date while the computational complexity is at least three times lower compared with other simplified feed-forward CPE techniques.Department of Electrical EngineeringDepartment of Electronic and Information Engineerin

Analytical BER performance in differential n-PSK coherent transmission system influenced by equalization enhanced phase noise

Long-haul high speed optical transmission systems are significantly distorted by the interplay between the electronic chromatic dispersion (CD) equalization and the local oscillator (LO) laser phase noise, which leads to an effect of equalization enhanced phase noise (EEPN). The EEPN degrades the performance of optical communication systems severely with the increment of fiber dispersion, LO laser linewidth, symbol rate, and modulation format. In this paper, we present an analytical model for evaluating the performance of bit-error-rate (BER) versus signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the n-level phase shift keying (n-PSK) coherent transmission system employing differential carrier phase estimation (CPE), where the influence of EEPN is considered. Theoretical results based on this model have been investigated for the differential quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK), the differential 8-PSK (D8PSK), and the differential 16-PSK (D16PSK) coherent transmission systems. The influence of EEPN on the BER performance in term of the fiber dispersion, the LO phase noise, the symbol rate, and the modulation format are analyzed in detail. The BER behaviors based on this analytical model achieve a good agreement with previously reported BER floors influenced by EEPN. Further simulations have also been carried out in the differential CPE considering EEPN. The results indicate that this analytical model can give an accurate prediction for the DQPSK system, and a leading-order approximation for the D8PSK and the D16PSK systems

Comparison of Optical Single Sideband Techniques for THz-over-fiber Systems

The use of single sideband (SSB) signals and envelope detection is a promising approach to enable the use of economic free-running lasers in photonic THz communications. To combat the signal-signal beat interference (SSBI) associated with envelope detection, broad guard bands (GBs) may be used given the large unregulated spectrum available at THz frequencies (100 GHz - 10 THz). In this scenario, the conventional way of generating SSB signals through a digital SSB filter (here referred to as the CSSB scheme) would require quite high analog digital-to-analog converter (DAC) bandwidths. Digital virtual SSB (DVSSB) and analog virtual SSB (AVSSB) have been proposed in direct-detection optical systems for relaxing the DAC bandwidth requirements. In this paper, we compare the three techniques through simulations and implement them, for the first time, in a THz-over-fiber (ToF) system operating at 250 GHz. For the transmission experiments we employ 5 GBd 16-QAM signals with three different GBs (5.5 GHz, 4.75 GHz and 3.5 GHz). The simulations show that the best performance is obtained with the AVSSB technique, while the worst is obtained with the DVSSB scheme, where the quality of the generated sideband degrades with carrier-to-sideband power ratio. In the experimental transmissions, where receiver noise was the main source of noise, similar behavior was found between the three techniques. At the 3.5 GHz GB, however, the DVSSB exhibited a penalty of 1 dB with respect to the other two. This is likely to be due to nonlinear distortions caused by the increase in the virtual tone power