Bandwidth efficient transmission of 4 Gb/s on two microwave QPSK subcarriers over a 48 km optical link

Abstract

The use of two quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK)-modulated subcarriers over a wideband direct detection optical communications system with a RF bandwidth efficiency of 1 b/s/Hz is reported. It is shown that two subcarriers each carrying 2 Gb/s QPSK, compactly spaced at just twice the data rate, can achieve a receiver sensitivity of -19.5 dBm over 48 km without crosstalk between subcarriers. This represents a receiver sensitivity improvement of 5 dB over a 4-Gb/s single QPSK subcarrier system.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>