Real-time DSP-based optical OFDM transmission

We present the design of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) based optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmitter operating at 21.4 GS/s and an experimental assessment of its performance in a directly-detected 8.34 Gbit/s QPSK-OFDM configuration over 1600 km of uncompensated standard fiber. We also discuss the suitability of OFDM technology for low-cost, low-power optical interconnects.