Intermittent dynamics switching on the route to chaos in a discrete-mode laser with long time-delayed feedback is experimentally and numerically studied by analyzing the time series, power spectra, and phase portraits. The results show two types of dynamics switching: one or multiple times regular intermittent dynamics switching between stable state and square-wave envelope period-one oscillation within one feedback round time, and the irregular intermittent dynamics switching between stable state and quasi-periodic or multi-states or chaos with higher feedback ratio and bias currents. The relationship between the duty cycle of period-one oscillation and the feedback ratio has been analyzed. The map of the dynamics distribution in the parameter space of feedback ratio and bias current is plotted for a better understanding of dynamics evolution in long external cavity discrete-mode lasers.

The previously reported hybrid orthogonal frequency division multiplexing-digital filter multiple access (OFDM-DFMA) PONs offer promising solutions for seamlessly converging optical and mobile networks for 5G. However, the hybrid OFDM-DFMA PONs based on intensity-modulation and direct-detection (IMDD) convey double sideband (DSB) signals at different sub-wavelengths, this halves the spectral efficiency and signal transmission capacity. In this article, hybrid single sideband (SSB) OFDM-DFMA PONs are proposed and explored, for the first time, where multiple SSB OFDM channels produced without employing the Hilbert transform operation are multiplexed using orthogonal digital filtering in ONUs, and demultiplexed/demodulated by a single FFT operation in OLT without incorporating matching filters. It is shown that similar to the DSB PON, the proposed SSB PON has excellent robustness against digital filter characteristic variations and channel interferences. More importantly, it decreases peak-to-average power ratios (PAPRs) of digitally-filtered OFDM signals by >2 dB, thus leading to >2 dB reductions in optimum signal clipping ratio and >1 bit reductions in minimum required DAC/ADC resolution bits. For fixed spectral bandwidths, the SSB PON almost doubles the maximum upstream transmission capacity without considerably degrading its differential ONU optical launch power dynamic range compared to the DSB PON. While for fixed upstream signal transmission capacities, compared to the DSB PON, the SSB PON not only halves the overall signal transmission bandwidth, but also leads to >2.5 dB (>1.2 dB) improvements in power budget (differential optical launch power dynamic range for ONUs locating at high frequency regions).

DSP-enhanced intensity-modulation direct-detection (IM/DD) systems can support up to 56 Gb/s over 100 km signal transmissions at C-band. To achieve higher data rates and longer transmission distances, we propose data-aided iterative algorithm (DIA) and decision-directed DIA (DD-DIA) to digitally mitigate signal-signal beating interference (SSBI) without requiring any modifications to physical layer structures. DIA utilizes pilot symbols with uniformly spaced insertions to relax the modified Gerchberg-Saxton (G-S) algorithms that suffer from the local optimum problem. To further improve the symbol error rate (SER) performance and convergence speed, DD-DIA introduces a decision process to generate pseudo-pilots. We numerically compare DIA with other algorithms and find that DIA can recover signals subject to large fiber dispersions corresponding to which conventional IA and Volterra filter (VF) fail, while DD-DIA significantly accelerates the convergence speed and improves the reconstruction performance compared with DIA, it can support 100-Gb/s PAM4 over 400-km IM/DD transmissions within just 50 iterations. Two orders of magnitude reductions in SER is observed for 100 Gb/s PAM4 signal transmission over 100-km SSMFs. Compared with conventional IA, the proposed techniques have higher convergence speeds, better global optimum features and large tolerances to physical model errors. In particular, DD-DIA results in larger optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR)/ received optical power (ROP) improvement, higher transmission capacities and less computational complexity. DD-DIA is a promising algorithm for efficiently reconstructing 2-dimensional optical field for conventional IM/DD optical transmission systems.

Chromatic dispersion-enhanced signal-signal beating interference (SSBI) considerably affects the performance of intensity-modulation and direct-detection (IM/DD) fiber transmission systems. For recovering optical fields from received double sideband signals after propagating through IM/DD transmission systems, Gerchberg-Saxton (G-S) iterative algorithms are promising, which, however, suffers slow convergence speeds and local optimization problems. In this paper, we propose a multi-constraint iterative algorithm (MCIA) to extend the Gerchberg-Saxton-based linearized detection. The proposed technique can accelerate the convergence speed and realize nonlinear-equalization-free detection. Based on the data-aided iterative algorithm (DIA) and the decision-directed data-aided iterative algorithm (DD-DIA), the proposed technique reuses redundant bits from channel coding to not only correct decision errors but also enforce the constraints on the task function to further accelerate the whole optical field retrieval processing. Simulation results show that, compared with the DD-DIA, the MCIA reduces the received optical power (ROP) by about 1.5-dB for a 100-Gb/s over 50-km SSMF PAM-4 signal transmission at the symbol error rate (SER) of 2×10⁻². For a 100-Gb/s over 400-km SSMF transmission system, just 30 MCIA iterations is needed, which is 30% reduction in iteration count compared with the DD-DIA. For further increased transmission capacities, the MCIA can improve the SER by two orders of magnitude compared with the conventional IA. To validate the effectiveness of the MCIA, we also conduct experiments to transmit 92-Gb/s PAM-4 signals over 50-km IM/DD fibre systems. We find that the MCIA has a 1-dB ROP improvement compared with the DD-DIA. Compared with Volterra nonlinear equalization, the BERs of the MCIA with a simple linear equalizer are reduced by more than one order of magnitude with only 52 MCIA iterations.

A novel digital signal processing (DSP)-based scheme for physical layer security in coherent optical communication systems is proposed and numerically investigated. The optical layer signal encryption is accomplished by two dispersive elements and one phase modulator (PM) driven by a DSP-generated encryption key, whilst signal decryption uses similar components but with inverted dispersion values and security keys. A critical aspect of the DSP-based physical layer security is that the security keys, driving the PMs to hide/recover the data signals, must be highly unpredictable and noise-like, thus orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals are employed as they possess these characteristics, they can also be easily generated and cover a suitably wide range of unique keys. Numerical simulations are conducted to determine optimum system parameters for achieving a high level of security, the key parameters requiring optimization are the dispersion of the dispersive elements and the bandwidth of the security keys. Using these determined optimum parameters, in-depth investigations are undertaken of encryption/decryption induced transmission performance penalties, sensitives to various parameter offsets and operation over various transmission distances. To observe any data signal dependencies, various performance metrics are investigated for different combinations of modulation formats (DQPSK and 16QAM) and baud rates (40 Gbaud and 100 Gbaud) for the transmitted data signals. The proposed DSP-based physical layer security scheme is shown to have the potential to achieve, in a low-cost and highly effective manner, a high level of physical layer security with acceptable performance penalties for existing coherent optical communication systems.

In PON-based mobile fronthauls, direct inter-ONU communications without passing end-user traffic to the OLT offer a promising solution for fulfilling the stringent latency and bandwidth requirements of 5G and beyond networks. In this paper, with slight modifications to the PON remote node, a concurrent inter-ONU and upstream communication technique is proposed and experimentally demonstrated in 101.6Gbit/s multipoint-to-point hybrid SSB OFDM digital filter multiple access (DFMA) IMDD PONs over 25km SSMFs. Multiple gapless inter-ONU and upstream SSB signals are aggregated by digital orthogonal filtering in each ONU transmitter. A single FFT operation is applied for demultiplex and demodulation in the OLT/ONU receivers. The results show that for both the inter-ONU and upstream transmissions, the optimum length of digital filters is 32, based on which the power penalties due to the fiber transmission and ONU channel interference are <1dB and 30% improvements in aggregated signal transmission capacity. In addition, detailed experimental investigations are also undertaken of the trade-off between differential ONU optical launch power dynamic range and aggregated signal transmission capacity. An approximately 1dB increase in ONU launch power dynamic range is achievable by reducing the aggregated signal transmission capacity by 5Gbit/s.