Mitigation of phase noise in all-optical OFDM systems based on minimizing interaction time between subcarriers

A new approach to mitigate the phase noise in all-optical OFDM systems is analytically modeled and numerically demonstrated. The interaction time between subcarriers is minimized by shaping the envelopes of QAM subcarriers and making a delay time between even and odd subcarriers. Return-to-zero (RZ) coding is adopted for shaping the envelopes of subcarriers. In addition, the subcarriers are alternately delayed (AD) by optical time delayers. The performance of an all-optical OFDM system, that implements the proposed technique, is analyzed and simulated. This system has 29 subcarriers with symbol rate of 25 Gsymbol/s and is composed of coupler-based inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT)/fast Fourier transform (FFT) schemes. Each subcarrier is modulated with QAM format before shaping with RZ coding. Due to RZ being more affected by dispersion; a full periodic dispersion map is adopted to keep the total accumulated dispersion low. The results reveal that the nonlinear phase noise (NPN) due to fiber nonlinearity is significantly mitigated when the time delay between the odd and even subcarriers is equal to half the symbol period. The total phase noise variance is reduced from 9.3×10−3 to 6.1×10−3 rad2 when employing AD RZ-QAM for a transmission distance of 550 km. Furthermore, both the transmission distance and optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) are improved when compared to all-optical OFDM systems that adopt traditional QAM modulation formats.