Realization of optical OFDM using time lenses and its comparison with optical OFDM using FFT

An optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) scheme with Fourier transform in optical domain using time lenses both at the transmitter and at the receiver is analyzed. The comparison of performance between this scheme with the optical OFDM scheme that utilizes fast Fourier transform (FFT) and inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT) in electrical domain is made. The nonlinear effects induced by Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) as well as by the fiber are investigated for both schemes. Results show that the coherent OFDM using time lenses has almost the same performance as that using FFT when the electrical driving message signal voltages are low so that MZM operates in the linear region. The nonlinearity of MZM deteriorates the conventional coherent OFDM based on FFT when the power of electrical driving signal increases significantly, but only has negligible impairment on the coherent OFDM using time lenses. Details of the time lens set up are provided and a novel scheme to implement the time lens without requiring the quadratic dependence of the driving voltage is presented.