Study on RZ-4PAM downstream signals with duty cycles of 33% and 50% for optical access system application

Abstract

4-ary pulse amplitude modulation (4PAM) signals with 33% and 50% return-to-zero (RZ) clocks are generated for passive optical network (PON). We demonstrate that RZ-4PAM signals with duty cycles of 33% and 50% after transmission over 20-km-long single mode fiber (SMF) at 10 Gbit/s can be directly detected by using one photo detector, and the original data can also be restored by one M-ary threshold detector and one 4PAM sequence decoder. The optical spectra of 33% and 50% RZ-4PAM signals are measured, and their eye-diagrams before and after transmission are also analyzed. Simulation results show that 33% and 50% RZ-4PAM downlink signals can be received effectively, and the received power values are −15.1 dBm and −13.8 dBm when the bit error rate (BER) is 10^-6. Moreover, 33% RZ-4PAM optical signals have better reception performance than 50% RZ-4PAM optical signals.