Self-Seeded RSOA-Fiber Cavity Lasers vs. ASE Spectrum-Sliced or Externally Seeded Transmitters—A Comparative Study

Abstract

Reflective semiconductor optical amplifier fiber cavity lasers (RSOA-FCLs) are appealing, colorless, self-seeded, self-tuning and cost-efficient upstream transmitters. They are of interest for wavelength division multiplexed passive optical networks (WDM-PONs) based links. In this paper, we compare RSOA-FCLs with alternative colorless sources, namely the amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) spectrum-sliced and the externally seeded RSOAs. We compare the differences in output power, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), relative intensity noise (RIN), frequency response and transmission characteristics of these three OPEN ACCESSAppl. Sci. 2015Sci. , 5 1923 sources. It is shown that an RSOA-FCL offers a higher output power over an ASE spectrum-sliced source with SNR, RIN and frequency response characteristics halfway between an ASE spectrum-sliced and a more expensive externally seeded RSOA. The results show that the RSOA-FCL is a cost-efficient WDM-PON upstream source, borrowing simplicity and cost-efficiency from ASE spectrum slicing with characteristics that are, in many instances, good enough to perform short-haul transmission. To substantiate our statement and to quantitatively compare the potential of the three schemes, we perform data transmission experiments at 5 and 10 Gbit/s.

Polarization-Discriminated RSOA–EAM for Colorless Transmitter in WDM–PON

“…To this end, many colorless transmitter solutions have been proposed based on the reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) or RSOA integrated with an electro-absorption modulator (RSOA-EAM), such as the spectrum-sliced RSOA [7], the RSOA fiber-cavity laser (FCL) [8][9][10][11], the externally seeded RSOA [12][13][14][15], and the wavelength-reuse RSOA [16][17][18][19]. The RSOA-FCL balances the cost and performance among the first three schemes and is thus viable for short-reach applications up to 10 Gb/s [20], but dispersion-shifted fiber (DSF) is required for long reach in preventing multimode dispersion [21]. The wavelength-reuse scheme is free of this requirement, but its upstream performance is subject to the unsuppressed downstream components [17].…”

Multi-Twin-SSB Modulation with Direct Detection Based on Kramers–Kronig Scheme for Long-Reach PON Downstream

“…Recently, emerging services such as 4K/8K, 5G and virtual reality (VR)/ augmented reality (AR) have imposed challenging demands on passive optical networks (PONs) [1][2][3][4][5][6]. The future PONs should be able to provide on-demand modifications of traffic transmission policies through network re-configurability, flexibility and elasticity.…”