100-Gb/s DD-MB-OFDM Metro Network With 11-Gb/s Granularity and 2.85-GHz Receiver

An ultra-dense 100-Gb/s multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) system employing virtual-carrier-assisted direct-detection and a 2.85-GHz receiver bandwidth is demonstrated experimentally. Nine OFDM bands with a band spacing of 6 GHz and a band capacity of 11 Gb/s are employed. The proposed system enables single-band extraction with low-complexity, provides high granularity, flexibility, and scalability, and is proposed for metropolitan (metro) networks. The experiments show that the transmission of the 100-Gb/s MB-OFDM signal comprising the nine-bands along metro networks reaching 150 km is successfully accomplished with bit error ratio levels below the forward error correction threshold. Reduced penalty relative to back-to-back operation is observed for optical power levels launched into each fiber span in the range between 0 and 4 dBm.