Two orthogonal carriers assisted 101-Gb/s dual-band DDO-OFDM transmission over 320-km SSMF.

We propose a novel fading-free direct-detection optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DDO-OFDM) scheme for 100-Gb/s medium-reach transmission. In the proposed scheme, we adopts two bands spaced at 100-GHz to accommodate the same complex-valued OFDM signal. However, the signals are coupled with a pair of orthogonal optical carriers. By doing so, real and imaginary parts of the complex-valued OFDM signal can be recovered from the two bands, respectively. We also propose a cost-effective scheme to generate such DDO-OFDM signal using an optical 90-degree hybrid and an optical I/Q modulator. The advantage of the proposed method is that it is fading-free, and the electrical spectral efficiency (SE) is doubled compared to traditional direct-detection method. Finally, we experimentally demonstrated a 101-Gb/s dual-band transmission over 320-km SSMF within only 30-GHz electrical bandwidth, which is highly competitive in both capacity and cost.