Reusing Downstream Carrier in Colorless Laser Diode for Full-Duplex 64-QAM OFDM

Without the need of any inline data eraser, the downstream carrier is reused in an upstream colorless laser diode transmitter to demonstrate full-duplex bidirectional 64-QAM OFDM passive optical network (PON) at up to 18 Gb/s. Therein, the downstream signal is used to control the wavelength of upstream laser diode by injection locking, and the slave laser diode then generates the injection-locked carrier for carrying the upstream signal. Distributing the OFDM subcarriers into dual frequency regions for upstream (baseband at 0-3 GHz) and downstream (up-shifted band at 3-6 GHz) transmissions avoids the crosstalk and simplifies the full-duplex system. The downstream power splitting ratio of 60/40 is optimized for receiving/injection branches at user end. For the downstream 64-QAM OFDM data after propagating 25-km SMF, a sensitivity of received power at least -8.5 dBm is required to suppress the BER below 3.8 × 10^-3 for the forward-error correction (FEC) criterion. When directly reusing the downstream carrier with unerased data to injection-lock the colorless laser diode, the 25-km SMF transmitted upstream 64-QAM OFDM data exhibits an SNR of 22.9 dB and an error vector magnitude of 4.1%, which provides a BER of 1.5 × 10^-3 at a received power of -5.8 dBm. Such a downstream carrier reused colorless laser diode upstream transmitter with inline eraser-free operation has shown its applicability for full-duplex quadrature amplitude modulation orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing PON.