Experimental characterization of a burst-enabled O-OFDM transceiver

Current wavelength switched optical networks are forecasted to evolve and acquire elastic functionalities, achieved by using a flexible grid and deploying tunable transceivers with variable bandwidth and bitrate. An interesting approach is the combination of these gridless functionalities with time domain multiplexing techniques. Amplification of the expected bursty data streams seems to be one of the challenges when using Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers (EDFAs), as the burst pattern can cause non-negligible gain transients. Employing Optical Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (O-OFDM) based on electronic Digital Signal Processing (DSP), each transceiver can be dynamically adapted to different modulation formats and/or bandwidth occupancies while achieving sub-wavelength granularity. In this paper a burst-enabled tunable intensity-modulated direct-detection O-OFDM transceiver based on Fast Hartley Transform (FHT) is experimentally characterized.