Experimental demonstration of secure 100 Gb/s IMDD transmission over a 50 km SSMF using a quantum noise stream cipher and optical coarse-to-fine modulation.

In this paper, we experimentally demonstrate a secure 100 Gb/s 2-level intensity modulation and direct detection transmission over a 50 km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) using a quantum noise stream cipher (QNSC) technique and 8-bit digital to analog converters. Optical coarse-to-fine modulation (CTFM) has been proposed to simultaneously enhance the security and overcome the weakness of low modulation depth in the traditional CTFM scheme. The optical power instead of the radio-frequency signal power is adjusted to satisfy the required peak-to-peak relation for CTFM, and thus the coarse and fine modulation has the same modulation depth. Two optical CTFM schemes based on an optical coupler and a polarizing beam combiner (PBC) are proposed and their pros and cons are analyzed and compared. Considering the trade-off of transmission performance and security performance, the optical CTFM scheme based on PBC is preferred in our experiment. 2-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) is achieved using two dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulators (DD-MZM). Simultaneously, each DD-MZM is also used to achieve single-sideband (SSB) modulation to eliminate the power fading induced by fiber dispersion. By these means, 100 Gb/s 2-level PAM-QNSC signal transmission over 50 km SSMF with the bit error rate below the 7% overhead hard-decision forward error correction threshold of 3.8×10 is achieved. The results validate that the proposed scheme is effective to realize low-cost, high-speed, and highly secure optical transmission in the data center.