Self-homodyne 24×32-QAM superchannel receiver enabled by all-optical comb regeneration using Brillouin amplification

Journal article, 2016

We demonstrate and characterize an all-optical self-homodyne (SH) frequency superchannel enabled by comb regeneration at the receiver. In order to generate the superchannel, we use a frequency comb with 26 carriers spaced by 25 GHz at the transmitter, from which 24 carriers are modulated with polarization-multiplexed 32 quadrature amplitude modulation (PM 32-QAM) data. To enable comb regeneration at the receiver side, the two central carriers remain unmodulated. High fidelity comb regeneration is achieved by filtering the two unmodulated carriers with an approximately 25 MHz wide optical filter based on Brillouin amplification before a parametric mixer. The carriers from the regenerated comb are then used as local oscillator for SH detection. We demonstrate that all 24 carriers can be detected with an optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) penalty lower than 2.5 dB in a back-to-back scenario. We also demonstrate that the whole superchannel can be transmitted through 120 km of single-mode fiber (SMF) and be detected with bit-error rate (BER) below 0.015.