Effectiveness of phase-conjugated twin waves on fiber nonlinearity in spatially multiplexed all-optical OFDM system

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of using phase-conjugated twin waves (PCTWs) technique to mitigate fiber nonlinear impairments in spatially multiplexed all-optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (AO-OFDM) systems. In this technique, AO-OFDM signal and its phase-conjugated copy are directly transmitted through two identical fiber links. At the receiver, the two signals are coherently superimposed to cancel the phase noise and to enhance signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). To show the effectiveness of proposed technique, a spatially multiplexed AO-OFDM system is demonstrated by numerical simulation. AO-OFDM signal and its phase conjugated copy are optically generated by using optical coupler-based inverse fast Fourier transform (OIFFT)/fast Fourier transform (OFFT). The generated signal includes 29 subcarriers where each subcarrier is modulated by 4-quadrature amplitude modulation (4QAM) format at a symbol rate of 25 Gsymbol/s. The results reveal that transmission performance is considerably improved where the transmission distance of the proposed system is increased by similar to 45% as compared to that of original system without PCTWs technique. (C) 2016 Published by Elsevier Inc.