Frequency interleaving towards spectrally efficient directly detected optical OFDM for next-generation optical access networks

In this paper, we theoretically analyze and demonstrate that spectral efficiency of a conventional direct detection based optical OFDM system (DDO-OFDM) can be improved significantly using frequency interleaving of adjacent DDO-OFDM channels where OFDM signal band of one channel occupies the spectral gap of other channel and vice versa. We show that, at optimum operating condition, the proposed technique can effectively improve the spectral efficiency of the conventional DDO-OFDM system as much as 50%. We also show that such a frequency interleaved DDO-OFDM system, with a bit rate of 48 Gb/s within 25 GHz bandwidth, achieves sufficient power budget after transmission over 25 km single mode fiber to be used in next-generation time-division-multiplexed passive optical networks (TDM-PON). Moreover, by applying 64- quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM), the system can be further scaled up to 96 Gb/s with a power budget sufficient for 1:16 split TDM-PON.