Xing Ouyang

Spectrally-sliced coherent receivers (SSRx) are potentially attractive for future high-speed access networks, as they allow the use of low-cost, low-bandwidth commodity components with minimal impact on performance. In this letter, we present such a receiver, and show that it is capable of detecting a single carrier, high bandwidth 100 Gb/s PDM-QPSK optical signal using two parallel coherent receivers with reduced front-end bandwidths as low as 6.5 GHz. The receivers utilize frequency separated local oscillators derived from an integrated injection-locked gain-switched comb laser assembly (iCLA) followed by an all-active $1\times 4$ demultiplexer photonic integrated circuit (PIC) to derive the spectral signal slices. The high mutual coherence of the comb lines is then exploited to enable signal reconstruction in the digital domain. The use of the active demultiplexer PIC is a key advance compared to previous work using passive comb demultiplexers as it delivers sufficient local oscillator power without the need for bulky, external optical amplifiers to compensate for demultiplexer losses. Furthermore, a minimal performance penalty is observed (< 1dB at the HD-FEC limit), compared to a conventional high-bandwidth receiver. Importantly, the active iCLA and demultiplexer PIC solutions demonstrated here are key building blocks required for a fully integrated spectrally-sliced coherent receiver for future coherent access networks.

In multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems, channel estimation is of crucial importance to guarantee reliable recovery of ultra-high-speed MIMO signals. This paper proposes a novel channel estimation algorithm for the emerging MIMO-based orthogonal chirp-division multiplexing (OCDM) systems by utilizing the unique features of OCDM signals. In the proposed algorithm, a set of pilot signals is designed based on the Fresnel basis, which is essentially a family of orthogonal linear chirps. The pilots are assigned to different antennas for transmission occupying the same time slot and bandwidth. According to the convolution-preservation theorem of the Fresnel transforms, the transfer matrices of MIMO-OCDM systems can be readily estimated at the receiver without any inter-antenna interference, even if the pilots overlap in both the time and frequency domains. The proposed algorithm avoids bandwidth waste in conventional channel estimators, in which silent pilots will be required in time and/or frequency to ensure the received MIMO pilots separable. We show that the proposed algorithm is unbiased for the unique OCDM pilots and has better estimate accuracy and system performance. Finally, analysis and numerical results are provided to validate its advantages as a promising algorithm for emerging wireless access technology based on MIMO-OCDM.

A highly flexible wavelength and space switched analog radio-over-fiber (ARoF) fronthaul transmission of a millimeter-wave (mmWave) emerging 6G waveform over a centralized/cloud radio access network (C-RAN) is experimentally demonstrated in this work. A spread spectrum multiplexing technique — orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM) — which is highly resilient to inter-channel interference and enables enhanced channel estimation is utilized in the fronthaul transmission demonstration. The flexible properties of a low noise silicon photonic (SiP) microring resonator (MRR) based tunable laser and a low cross-talk $4\times 4$ SiP optical wavelength/space switch are combined to form a reconfigurable 10 km fronthaul system enabling 64-QAM OCDM transmission at 24 GHz with consistent performances ~5% EVM across all test wavelengths/ports. A signal constituting Wi-Fi and 5G NR standard compatible 64-QAM orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) bands, at 10 GHz and 24 GHz respectively, are also transmitted and evaluated in the proposed system with EVM performances below 64-QAM EVM limit (8%) achieved, thus demonstrating the system’s potential in a future converged multi-service environment.

The spectrally-sliced coherent receiver is an attractive solution for future optical access network applications where cost is a sensitive factor, as it enables reduced bandwidth of the analog front-end components and analog-to-digital convertors when compared to a conventional intradyne coherent receiver. In a proof-of-concept experiment, we demonstrate a single-polarization 50 Gb/s QPSK C-band transmission experiment over 40 km of standard (G.652) fiber using receiver bandwidths as low as 6.25 GHz and also utilize an array of local oscillator lines derived from an injection locked gain-switched optical frequency comb, which can be realized as a compact photonic integrated circuit. This paper also analyses the influence of optical frequency comb properties on the quality of the reconstructed signal. The critical parameters considered in this study include comb power and flatness, mutual comb line coherence, and the comb line suppression ratio after demultiplexing the comb lines. We have shown that with practically achievable comb parameter values, the receiver can operate with less than a 1 dB sensitivity penalty compared to a conventional intradyne receiver. The scheme has the potential to provide a low-cost coherent receiver solution for next-generation access networks.

Envisaged network scaling in the beyond 5G and 6G era makes the optical transport of high bandwidth radio signals a critical aspect for future radio access networks (RANs), while the move toward wireless transmission in millimeter-wave (mm-wave) and terahertz (THz) environments is pushing a departure from the currently deployed orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) modulation scheme. In this work, the orthogonal chirp-division multiplexing (OCDM) waveform is experimentally deployed in a converged optical/mm-wave transmission system comprising 10 km analog radio-over-fiber (A-RoF) transmission, remote mm-wave generation and 2 m wireless transmission at 60 GHz. System performance is evaluated in terms of both bit error ratio (BER) and error vector magnitude (EVM) for a wideband 4 GHz 16 Gb/s signal and 128/256-Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) mobile signals compatible with 5G new radio numerology. OCDM is shown to outperform OFDM by offering enhanced robustness to channel frequency selectivity, enabling performances below the forward error correction (FEC) limit in all cases and exhibiting an EVM as low as 3.4% in the case of the mobile signal transmission.

We propose probabilistically shaped quadrature amplitude modulation (PS-QAM) formats to maximize the capacity in fiber transmission systems using orthogonal chirp-division multiplexing (OCDM). OCDM possesses the property of chirp spread spectrum (CSS), leading to improved resilience to system impairments. We further investigate the recently proposed robust channel estimator based on pulse compression and noise rejection and experimentally demonstrate its feasibility in an intensity-modulated/direction-detection (IM/DD) OCDM system. By applying the proposed PS-QAM based OCDM to an IM/DD optical system, a net information rate of 111.1 Gb/s has been successfully achieved using a 10-GHz class Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) and has also shown improved performance compared to the conventional PS-QAM based orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. Moreover, due to the superior characteristics of OCDM, there is no need for additional feedback to obtain the prior knowledge of channel state information in the proposed system, leading to reduced complexity and cost.

Orthogonal chirp-division multiplexing (OCDM) has been recently proposed as an attractive modulation technique for realizing high-speed coherent lightwave systems in virtue of its resilience against system impairments. However, the complex-valued OCDM signal is not directly viable for optical intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) systems. In this paper, a double-sideband (DSB)-modulated OCDM scheme is proposed for short-reach, high-speed IM/DD systems. In the proposed scheme, the real-valued OCDM signal is generated by a simple digital up-conversion technique, which converts the complex-baseband signal to a passband to avoid the aliasing for DSB modulation. At the receiver, inverse operations revert the signal back to the baseband for demodulation. Experiments were carried out to validate the feasibility and advantages of the proposed scheme, and OCDM signals with data rates up to 174.5 Gbit/s were successfully demonstrated. The results confirm that the proposed IM/DD-OCDM system is more robust to impairments and thus achieves better performance than a discrete multi-tone system.