Subcarrier modulation for transmission of 1-Gbit/s channels over 500 m of 62.5-/spl mu/m multimode fiber

Summary form only given. The growing demand for high-speed interconnects for LAN applications makes it interesting to study alternative modulation formats to increase the transmission capacity of widely installed 62.5-/spl mu/m multimode fiber (MMF). Subcarrier multiplexing (SCM) is an attractive technique for increasing the data capacity of existing multimode fiber links. In this paper we report the use of two different subcarriers at frequencies up to 5.5 GHz each transmitting 1 Gbit/s over 500 m of MMF. Using conventional NRZ modulation a data channel is limited in bandwidth by the modal dispersion inherent in multimode fiber. Subcarrier multiplexing presents a way to overcome this limitation by using the regions of fairly flat response at frequencies beyond the fiber's 3-dB frequency. By transmitting several narrowband channels in the passband regions, rather than a single broadband channel, a significant increase in the data transmission capacity of MMF is possible.