Experimental demonstration of optical MIMO transmission for SCFDM-PON based on polarization interleaving and direct detection

The OFDM-PON and SCFDM-PON based on powerful digital signal processing (DSP) are promising candidates for next-generation optical access networks. Recently polarization-division-multiplexing (PDM) transmission with direct detection has been proposed for OFDM-PON to effectively reduce the bandwidth requirement of optical and electrical components. However, the PDM scheme has high algorithm complexity. In this paper, we propose a polarization interleaving (PI) approach, which can significantly reduce the bandwidth requirement for components while achieving a similar 2×2 MIMO algorithm with coherently-detected PDM-OFDM scheme. Downstream PI-SCFDM transmission is experimentally demonstrated. The scheme can be easily extended to OFDM-PON.