Incoherent 32-Level Optical Multilevel Signaling Technologies

Abstract

In order to explore the potential of optical multilevel signaling for high-speed optical fiber networks, an incoherent 50 Gbit/s 32-level optical multilevel signaling (combination of QASK and 8-DPSK) is demonstrated, for the first time. The application of an ISI-suppressed modulation technique, an orthogonally-coupled differential detection technique and the digital signal processing technique have also been proposed and verified to enhance the performance of multilevel signaling. A 100-km dispersion shifted fiber transmission has also been performed, and the degradation via optical fiber nonlinear effect, self-phase modulation (SPM), is observed. The receiver side simple digital cancellation technique of the SPM-induced phase shift is also proposed and experimentally demonstrated with more than 6.8 dB increase of fiber input power.