Reusing a Data-Erased ASE Carrier in a Weak-Resonant-Cavity Laser Diode for Noise-Suppressed Error-Free Transmission

Under injection-locking with downstream amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) carrier spectrally sliced by a 200-GHz arrayed waveguide grating and amplitude-squeezed by a gain-saturated semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), the injection-level-dependent extinction ratio (ER) and bit-error-rate (BER) penalty of a weak-resonant-cavity Fabry-Perot laser diode (WRC-FPLD) upstream transmitter are investigated. By fixing the downstream power at -13 dBm, the downstream ASE data is amplitude-squeezed by the gain-saturated SOA to greatly suppress the ER from 12.6 to 2.2 dB, which improves the BER of upstream data carried by the reused ASE in the WRC-FPLD. By reusing the amplitude-squeezed downstream ASE carrier in the upstream WRC-FPLD, such a single ASE-based bidirectional channelized transmission network provides downstream and upstream receiving sensitivities of <;-27.5 and 21.8 dBm, respectively, at a BER of 10^-9 after 25 km transmission.