Towards bandwidth scalable transceiver technology for optical metro-access networks

Massive fiber-to-the-home network deployment is creating a challenge for telecommunications network operators: exponential increase of the power consumption at the central offices and a never ending quest for equipment upgrades operating at higher bandwidth. In this paper, we report on flexible signal slicing technique, which allows transmission of high-bandwidth signals via low bandwidth electrical and opto-electrical equipment. The presented signal slicing technique is highly scalable in terms of bandwidth which is determined by the number of slices used. In this paper performance of scalable sliceable transceiver for 1 Gbit/s non-return to zero (NRZ) signal sliced into two slices is presented. Digital signal processing (DSP) power consumption and latency values for proposed sliceable transceiver technique are also discussed. In this research post FEC with 7% overhead error free transmission has been demonstrated over different fiber types and lengths up to 25 km.