On the performance of all-optical OFDM based PM-QPSK and PM-16QAM

A polarization multiplexed all-optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (AO-OFDM) system is investigated analytically and numerically, with 12.5 Gbaud symbol rate, that is compatible with the International Telecommunication Union flexible grid. We demonstrate that fast adaptive filtering is not require at the receiver and chromatic dispersion with polarization mode dispersion can be compensated without the cyclic prefix insertion, with the maximum spectral efficiency by using proper optical filter. System performance are numerically and analytically evaluated considering nonlinear effects and power consumption, evidencing a good agreement between the theoretical model and numerical results. We compare AO-OFDM performance with coherent OFDM scheme using the derived theoretical formula and numerical results. 21 subcarriers are investigated with quadrature phase shift keying modulation and 7 subcarriers in case of 16-quadrature amplitude modulation, with a total capacity of 976.5 Gb/s and 651 Gb/s, respectively, considering 7% forward error correction overhead.