Optical single sideband transmission at 10 Gb/s using only electrical dispersion compensation

A system is presented which uses optical single sideband transmission at 10 Gb/s together with electrical dispersion compensation at the receiver. Transmission with a bit error rate better than 10^-10 on nondispersion shifted fiber is experimentally demonstrated over 320 km and the dispersion from 1000 km of fiber was effectively equalized in simulation. In the transmitter, driving one or two modulators with a combination of a baseband digital signal and the Hilbert transform of that signal creates an optical single sideband signal. In terms of reducing the effects of chromatic dispersion, transmitting the signal in a single sideband format has two advantages over a double sideband format. First, the optical bandwidth of the transmitted single sideband signal is approximately one half of a conventional double sideband signal. Second, an optical single sideband signal with transmitted carrier can be “self-homodyne” detected and the majority of the phase information preserved since no spectrum back folding occurs upon detection. This allows the received signal to be partially equalized in the electrical domain