Bidirectional intensity modulated/direct detection optical OFDM WDM-PON system

In this paper, we have evaluated a bidirectional wavelength division multiplexing passive optical network (WDM-PON) employing intensity modulated/direct detection optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (IM/DD-OFDM). The proposed system employs 100 Gbit/s 16 quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) downstream and 5 Gbit/s on-off keying (OOK) upstream wavelengths, respectively. The proposed system is considered low-cost as non-coherent IM/DD OFDM technology and a simple reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) colorless transmitter are employed and no dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) is needed. Based on the bit error rate ( BER ) results of WDM signals, the proposed WDM-PON system can achieve up to 1.6 Tbit/s (100 Gbit/s/ λ × 16 wavelengths) downstream transmission over a 30 km single mode fiber (SMF).