Coherent optical OFDM: has its time come? [Invited]

There has been growing interest in coherent optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (CO-OFDM). We aim to present the case that the time for CO-OFDM has come, in terms of the demand from today's ever-advancing optical networks and the availability of its underlying technologies. We first lay out the signal processing aspect for CO-OFDM and then show a 2 x 2 multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) OFDM representation for the single-mode fiber optical channel. Through numerical simulation and experimental demonstration, we further present and discuss various MIMO-OFDM systems focusing on their polarization-mode dispersion resilience. Among those systems, the 2 x 1 MIMO-OFDM configuration incorporating polarization-time coding shows promise for optical access networks and broadcast networks. Finally, another class of the frequency-domain equalization techniques, namely, incoherent or coherent optical single-carrier frequency-domain equalization (CO-SCFDE) is discussed and experimentally demonstrated. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America.