1.6 Tb/s Virtual-Carrier Assisted WDM Direct Detection Transmission Over 1200 km

Single-sideband (SSB) self-coherent detection (SCD) has attracted a lot of attention recently as a promising technology for short and medium reach optical transmission systems, such as data center interconnect (DCI) and metro applications, due to the low cost, the compact module size, and the possibility of electrical dispersion compensation. In addition, it has been shown that the SSB SCD can be effectively realized using a “virtual carrier,” which is generated digitally together with the information-bearing signal to significantly simplify the hardware implementation. In this paper, we present an experimental demonstration of an 8 × 256 Gb/s WDM SSB SCD transmission with virtual carriers over a record distance of 1200 km with Corning TXF fiber. To achieve this performance, two digital linearization techniques have been considered and compared, namely the Kramers–Kronig (KK) field reconstruction and iterative signal-signal beat interference cancellation. Furthermore, we introduce a novel scheme called dc-offset KK to minimize the performance penalty associated with filtering and resampling process of the conventional KK scheme.