Low-cost adaptive directly modulated optical OFDM based on semiconductor optical amplifier

• Low cost optical OFDM has great potential for next generation optical access networks and PONs.
• Optical OFDM has high flexibility in bandwidth manipulation, and high spectral efficiency.
• We propose adaptive direct modulation of semiconductor optical amplifier.
• New adaptive current loading techniques for PAPR reduction are proposed and analyzed.

Low cost optical OFDM has great potential for next generation optical access networks and PONs, due to its high flexibility in bandwidth manipulation, and high spectral efficiency. Here, a low cost optical OFDM is proposed, based on adaptive direct modulation semiconductor optical amplifier. Adaptive current loading techniques for PAPR (peak to average power ratio) reduction are proposed and analyzed. Simulations show that the proposed adaptive techniques enable significant BER improvement.