Digital dual-rate burst-mode receiver for 10G and 1G coexistence in optical access networks

A digital dual-rate burst-mode receiver, intended to support 10 and 1 Gb/s coexistence in optical access networks, is proposed and experimentally characterized. The receiver employs a standard DC-coupled photoreceiver followed by a 20 GS/s digitizer and the detection of the packet presence and line-rate is implemented in the digital domain. A polyphase, 2 samples-per-bit digital signal processing algorithm is then used for efficient clock and data recovery of the 10/1.25 Gb/s packets. The receiver performance is characterized in terms of sensitivity and dynamic range under burst-mode operation for 10/1.25 Gb/s intensity modulated data in terms of both the packet error rate (PER) and the payload bit error rate (pBER). The impact of packet preamble lengths of 16, 32, 48, and 64 bits, at 10 Gb/s, on the receiver performance is investigated. We show that there is a trade-off between pBER and PER that is limited by electrical noise and digitizer clipping at low and high received powers, respectively, and that a 16/2-bit preamble at 10/1.25 Gb/s is sufficient to reliably detect packets at both line-rates over a burst-to-burst dynamic range of 14,5 dB with a sensitivity of -18.5 dBm at 10 Gb/s.