Simplified twin-single-sideband direct detection system separating left and right sideband signals using a digital signal processing algorithm instead of optical bandpass filters.

Twin-single-sideband (twin-SSB) signals can be generated based on an in-phase- quadrature (I/Q) modulator, and two independent left sideband (LSB) and right sideband (RSB) signals carry individual data to effectively harvest the advantage of twin-SSB modulation, which achieves higher spectral efficiency. However, the conventional twin-SSB scheme employs two optical bandpass filters (OBPFs) and two photodetectors (PDs) for complete separation and detection at the receiver side. To mitigate the crosstalk between RSB and LSB signals and reduce the complexity and cost of the twin-SSB system, we propose a new scheme to realize twin-SSB without OBPFs separating LSB and RSB signals by a single-ended PD to improve system performance. According to the beating characteristics of the LSB and RSB, we can separate two independent sideband signals using a digital signal processing (DSP) algorithm added to the receiver end. Our simulation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme can obtain good bit error ratio (BER) performance of LSB and RSB signals. We designed a twin-SSB system with different modulation formats in the two sidebands, adopting geometric shaping 3PSK (GS-3PSK) modulation for the LSB and quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) modulation for the RSB. The BER of the LSB GS-3PSK and RSB QPSK signal can reach hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) when the received optical power (ROP) was > -17.5 and > -16 dBm, respectively, at different baud rates of 1-, 2-, and 4-Gbaud with a carrier frequency of 12-GHz over 10-km standard single-mode fiber (SSMF) transmission. For an 8-Gbaud baud rate with a carrier frequency of 12-GHz over 5-km SSMF transmission, the BER of the two sideband signals can still be below the HD-FEC threshold of 3.8 × 10 when the ROP was > -17 and > -16 dBm, respectively.