Enhancing the Anti-Dispersion Capability of the AO-OFDM System via a Well-Designed Optical Filter at the Transmitter

This paper proposes a novel method to improve the anti-dispersion ability of the all-optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (AO-OFDM) system. By replacing the Sinc-shaped filter with a Gauss-shaped filter for sub-carrier generation and inserting a cyclic prefix (CP), the impact of dispersion on the system can be significantly mitigated. Formula derivation and numerical analysis of the pulse-shaping function of the AO-OFDM system in the time domain for each cycle indicated that the pulse-shaping function generated by the Gauss-shaped filter was less affected by the dispersion effect than that of the Sinc-shaped filter. Meanwhile, less inter-carrier crosstalk between carriers was also observed. After carrying out system transmission simulations employing these two different filters, we found that the AO-OFDM system based on the Gauss-shaped filter could greatly improve the anti-dispersion ability compared with the system based on a Sinc-shaped filter. When the parameter settings in both schemes were identical, that is, the number of subcarriers was 32 and the power of a single subcarrier was −13 dBm, the bit error rate (BER) of the system based on the proposed Gauss-shaped filter after 60 km SMF transmission was only 1.596 × 10−3, while the BER of the traditional Sinc-shaped filter based system scheme was as high as 8.545 × 10−2.