High-speed WDM-PON using CW injection-locked Fabry-Pérot laser diodes

TLDR

The proposed WDM‑PON offers a low‑cost deployment by sharing CW laser sources at the central office and using inexpensive FP‑LDs for 10 Gb/s data rates. The authors propose a new WDM‑PON architecture that employs Fabry‑Pérot laser diodes injection‑locked by continuous‑wave seed light. They investigate the modulation characteristics of CW‑injection‑locked FP‑LDs and analyze how cavity‑mode location, transmission distance, and injection‑wavelength detuning affect overall transmission performance. Experimental results demonstrate 10 Gb/s uplink and downlink transmission, selective locking of up to 16 cavity modes with >30 dB side‑mode suppression, and polarization‑independent operation via a depolarizer.

Abstract

We propose a new WDM-PON architecture using Fabry-Pérot laser diodes (FP-LDs) that are injection-locked by continuous wave (CW) seed light. The modulation characteristics of the CW light injection-locked FP-LD are first investigated. Both uplink and downlink transmissions at 10 Gb/s are experimentally demonstrated using the proposed CW injection-locked FP-LDs. It is shown that up to 16 laser cavity modes can be selectively injection-locked with side mode suppression ratio larger than 30dB. The effects of the location of FP-LD cavity modes, transmission distance, and injection wavelength detuning on the overall transmission performance are investigated. The possibility of eliminating polarization dependence of the proposed CW injection scheme is also experimentally demonstrated by properly configuring a depolarizer. The deployment cost for the proposed WDM PON is potentially low from the fact that the CW laser sources located at the central office can be shared by many WDM-PONs and low-cost FP-LDs are used as light sources for data rates as high as 10 Gb/s.