A novel wavelength shift keying transmitter using a pair of Mach-Zehnder modulators

A novel and simple method to achieve wavelength shift keying (WSK) modulation is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The proposed WSK transmitter consists of a pair of Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs) that are biased appropriately to achieve complementary operation. When a non-return-to-zero data stream is applied to the two MZMs, thanks to the complementary operation of the MZMs, the WSK-modulated signal can be obtained by combining the two intensity-modulated optical signals. A tunable optical delay line (ODL) is applied to achieve synchronization between the two optical signals. The ODL can also be used to compensate for the dispersion-induced walk-off effect between the two optical carriers. The application of the proposed WSK transmitter in a passive optical network is demonstrated, in which the downstream WSK signal is reused as optical carrier for upstream intensity-modulated data transmission. The proposed approach is experimentally realized; experimental results verify the feasibility of the approach.