Performance of directly modulated OFDM data over multimode fiber link

The performance of orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) technology in the multimode fiber (MMF) optical communication system is investigated numerically. The mode dispersion in MMF is analyzed by utilizing the optical angular spectrum analysis method. Simulation results in terms of bit-error-rate (BER) and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) show that the transmission distance can reach up to 2.5-km at 10− 3 BER for 40-Gb/s data. Results of different modulation formats further indicate that better performance can be achieved by adopting multi-level modulation format.