Investigation of high-speed optical FSK generation scheme based on carrier suppression and phase modulation

We propose and numerically investigate a novel high-speed (40-Gb/s and above) optical frequency shift-keying (FSK) transmitter scheme. By optical carrier-suppressed modulation and differential phase-shift-keying (DPSK) to intensity modulation (IM) conversion, only one light source is needed in the proposed scheme to generate high-speed optical FSK signals. By using a Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) as phase modulator and an additional delay interferometer (DI) cascaded after the carrier-suppressed MZM to suppress the remaining carrier, the performance of our scheme can compete with the double-light-source counterparts. The transmission performances of the FSK signal generated with the proposed scheme as well as detuning and bandwidth tolerance of the demodulation filter are also carefully investigated. Simulation results show that the proposed FSK generation scheme is very suitable for the next-generation optical access network and optical label switching network. A potential application of our scheme in high-speed passive optical network is proposed.