Novel Optical Vector Signal Generation With Carrier Suppression and Frequency Multiplication Based on a Single-Electrode Mach-Zehnder Modulator

This investigation presents a novel modulation approach for generating optical vector signals using frequency multiplication based on double sideband with carrier suppression. A single-electrode Mach-Zehnder modulator is biased at null point with a driving signal consisting of a 10-GHz sinusoidal signal and a 5-GHz sinusoidal signal modulated with 1.25-Gb/s on-off keying, 1.25-Gb/s binary phase-shift keying data, or 625-MSym/s quadruple phase-shift keying data. After square-law photodetection, a 1.25-Gb/s radio-frequency signal at a sum frequency of 15 GHz is generated. After transmission over 50-km single-mode fiber, the power penalty of all three modulation formats is under 0.2 dB.