System Outage Probability Due to PMD in High-Speed Optical OFDM Transmission

In this paper, closed-form analytical bounds on PMD-induced symbol error rate and outage probability in high-speed long-haul optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexed (OFDM) systems are derived, evaluated, and verified experimentally in order to assess the PMD tolerance of this modulation format. To obtain the analytical results, the PMD channel is modeled as a linear time-invariant system, whose end-to-end transfer function is used to upper-bound symbol error and outage probabilities in IM/DD optical OFDM transmission. The symbol error rate bounds predicted by the general analytical model are verified experimentally on a 10-Gb/s OFDM system with instantaneous DGD ranging between Deltatau = 0 and 120 ps . The outage probability bounds indicate that, if no RF guard bands are required, OFDM enables high-speed transmission with at least twice the PMD tolerance provided by an equivalent uncompensated OOK-based system at system outage probabilities P_{out, sys} <10^-5 . If RF guard bands are required to mitigate effects of other distortions, it is shown that a penalty in the system PMD tolerance proportional to the intermediate RF subcarrier frequency, f _RF, is exerted. Consequently, a tolerance tradeoff exists in IM/DD OFDM systems, wherein f _RF as well as baseband constellation size may be viewed as design parameters that can be optimized depending on specific system requirements.