Self-seeding-based 10Gb/s over 25km optical OFDM transmissions utilizing face-to-face dual-RSOAs at gain saturation

Self-seeded passive optical networks (PONs) are currently attracting extensive research interest. In this paper, a novel self-seeded PON transmitter is, for the first time, proposed and experimentally demonstrated, which incorporates two face-to-face-positioned reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers (RSOAs) operating at their gain saturation regions: one RSOA directly driven by an upstream electrical signal and the other RSOA biased at a fixed current. Detailed experimental explorations are undertaken of the dynamic performance characteristics of the proposed transmitter. It is shown that, in comparison with previously reported self-seeded transmitters each employing a reflective mirror and a single electrical signal-driven RSOA, the proposed transmitter has a number of salient advantages including, considerably narrowed optical signal spectra, up to 16dB reduction in RINs of intensity-modulated optical signals, and residual intensity modulation crosstalk suppression as high as 10.7dB. The aforementioned features enable experimental demonstrations of real-time self-seeded 10Gb/s optical OFDM (OOFDM) transmitters. In particular, by making use of two low-cost RSOAs having their 3-dB modulation bandwidths as small as 1.125GHz, 10Gb/s over 25km adaptive OOFDM transmissions with power penalties of 0.6dB are experimentally achieved in the simple self-seeded IMDD PON systems.