Asymmetric direct detection of twin-SSB signals

We propose the asymmetric direct detection (ADD) of twin-single sideband (SSB) signals based on a simple receiver front-end composed of one optical filter and two photodiodes. ADD exploits the photocurrent difference between a filtered and unfiltered signal pair to reconstruct and linearize the received twin-SSB signal with a high electrical spectral efficiency (ESE). We evaluate the performance impact of the critical system parameters on ADD and demonstrate 231 Gb/s net rate 16-QAM twin-SSB transmission with 6.03 b/s/Hz ESE over an 80 km standard single-mode fiber below the ${1} \times {{10}^{ - 2}}$1×10^-2 hard-decision forward error correction threshold. We also found that the bit error rate performance of ADD is robust against the relative center wavelength drifting of the optical filter.