Investigation on inter-modulation products (IMPs) for IM-DD SCM optical links

The implementation of the subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) as the signaling format has been extensively researched in various analog and digital lightwave based broadband applications because of its promising versatility, cost effectiveness, convenient and simple offerings. However performance degradation is a matter of serious concern in such multi-channel intensity modulation-direct detection (IM-DD) systems caused by inter-modulation distortion (IMD) mechanism. In this paper the impact of key operational and physical parameters of a laser source on an IMD dominated two-tone IM-DD SCM system has been investigated which can thereby be exploited favorably to develop a reasonably IMD immune optical link.