Spectrally Efficient Direct-Detected OFDM Transmission Incorporating a Tunable Frequency Gap and an Iterative Detection Techniques

We analytically and experimentally demonstrate a linearly field-modulated, direct-detected virtual single-sideband orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (VSSB-OFDM) system that employs a tunable frequency gap and an iterative detection technique. The VSSB-OFDM that uses no frequency gap, which is referred to as the gapless VSSB-OFDM, is proposed as a spectrally efficient format. Compared with the intensity-modulated SSB-OFDM, the gapless VSSB-OFDM saves half the electrical bandwidth (BW), and exhibits better receiving sensitivity and more robust tolerance against fiber chromatic dispersion (CD). Furthermore, by incorporating a tunable frequency gap between the optical carrier and the OFDM data sideband, the calculating burden of the iterative detection is greatly alleviated and the system performance can be flexibly improved within moderate iterations. The width of the optimum frequency gap is found to be ${\sim} {\hbox {0.35}}$ sideband BW, which is reached by trading the levels of signal–signal beat interference and the residual image beat interference. Such a gapped VSSB-OFDM system requires fewer iterations to extract the desired data from the interfered signal and exhibits greater robustness against the carrier-to-signal-power ratio (CSPR) variation, compared with the gapless VSSB-OFDM. In this paper, the analytical model of the proposed gapped VSSB-OFDM system will be addressed. In addition, we also successfully conduct a gapped VSSB-OFDM signal transmission over 1600 km of uncompensated standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) with only ${\sim} {\hbox {3}}$ dB optical SNR (OSNR) penalty, and obtain a significant OSNR sensitivity improvement of ${\sim} {\hbox {8}}$ dB, compared with the gapless VSSB-OFDM, after such a 1600-km fiber link.