Effect of numbers of sub-carriers, cyclic prefix and analogue to digital converter parameters on coherent optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing modem's transmission performance

The number of sub-carriers, cyclic prefix (CP), and the characteristics of the analogue to digital converter (ADC), are significant parameters influencing the transmission capacity and distance of an optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OOFDM) modem. Numerical simulations of coherent OOFDM modems are undertaken to investigate the effect of the number of sub-carriers, the CP length and ADC associated parameters such as the sampling speed, clipping ratio and quantisation bit on the system performance over single mode fibre (SMF) links for data rates up to 80 Gb/s. The use of a large number of sub-carriers is more effective in combating fibre dispersion when compared with employing a long CP. Moreover in the presence of fibre nonlinearities identifying the optimum number of sub-carriers is crucial factor for the modem performance. For various signal data rates up to 40 Gb/s, a set of data rate and transmission distance-dependent optimum ADC parameters are identified. These parameters give rise to negligible clipping and quantisation noise, moreover ADC sampling speed can increase dispersion tolerance while transmitting over SMF links.