Real-time optical OFDM transmissions with spectral efficiency up to 6.93Â bit/s/Hz over 50Â km SSMF IMDD systems

Real-time optical OFDM transmissions based on FPGA with 6.93 bit/s/Hz spectral efficiency by using simple directly modulated DFB laser and DAC/ADC with sampling rate as low as 2GS/s without inline amplifier are experimentally demonstrated. 7.09-Gb/s OFDM signals with subcarrier modulation format up to 512-QAM can be successfully transmitted over 50-km SSMF with adopted HD-FEC (3.8×10−3). The robustness of system performance is also extensively explored to determine the tolerance to DAC/ADC resolution mismatch. It is shown that aggregate system capacity can be maintained almost constant for DAC/ADC resolution mismatch as large as 3bits due to the utilization of adaptive bit and power loading scheme. On the other hand, for a certain system configuration and an expected signal line rate, it also gives a reference minimum DAC/ADC boundary for practical deployment.