Theoretical CSPR analysis and performance comparison for Four Single-Sideband Modulation Schemes with Kramers-Kronig receiver

Abstract

Recently, high-speed optical transmission using single-side-band (SSB) modulation with Kramers-Kronig (KK) scheme has gained great attention due to its high spectral efficiency (SE) and capability of electronic chromatic dispersion compensation (CDC), which can be widely employed in optical metro networks as a promising transmission scheme. To our knowledge, the carrier-signal power ratio (CSPR) is the key parameter to SSB-based systems and the optimum CSPRs can vary distinctly in different SSB modulation schemes. In this paper, the SSB-based KK systems with four kinds of SSB signal generation schemes are investigated, i.e. optical carrier-assisted SSB (OCA-SSB), virtual carrier-assisted SSB (VCA-SSB), SSB subcarrier modulation (SSB SCM) with IQ modulator (IQM) and with dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator (DDMZM) respectively. Here, the detailed theoretical derivations of these modulation processing are given and the theoretical relationship between device parameters and the CSPR has been further studied for the different SSB schemes. In order to verify those theoretical analyses, a 224-Gb/s direct detection (DD) transmission with SSB 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) signal has been demonstrated based on four SSB generation methods. The results show that theoretical derivations are closely consist with numerical analysis, such as V-bias in the scheme of SSB SCM with IQM and optical modulation index (OMI) in SSB SCM with DDMZM. Therefore, our research can provide a theoretical guidance of appropriate device parameter configuration so as to achieve the optimum performance for SSB systems.