Flexible transceiver for an access network: a multicarrier entropy loading approach

Abstract

To cope with the extraordinary bandwidth demand, an optical access network based on point-to-multipoint (P2MP) topology has been widely applied. Recently, flexible transceivers have been investigated to maximize the optical power budget of optical network units for increasing the capacity of passive optical networks. In this work, we experimentally demonstrate a low-cost, high-bandwidth P2MP solution based on multicarrier modulations and probabilistic constellation shaping technology by reusing a 10G class directly modulated laser and avalanche photodetector for the first time to our knowledge. The proposed P2MP solution is capable of achieving fine granularity data rate adjustment from 12.5 Gb/s up to 63 Gb/s. We discuss the hardware implementation aspect of the proposed multicarrier entropy loading flexible transceiver. By means of a real-time transmission experiment, we show that the proposed P2MP solution can achieve a 29 dB power budget at a symmetric 53 Gb/s line rate, which makes it well positioned to support non-residential P2MP applications such as passive optical local area networks and fiber-to-the-office.