Experimental Demonstration of a Single-carrier Frequency

Division Multiple Address based PON (SCFDMA-PON)

Architecture
Juhao Li
(1)
, Cheng Zhang
(1)
, Fan Zhang
(1)
, Yongqi He
(1)
and Zhangyuan Chen
(1)

(1)
State Key Lab. of Advanced Optical Communication Systems & Networks,
Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China
((juhao_li@pku.edu.cn, fzhang@pku.edu.cn, chenzhy@pku.edu.cn))

Abstract We introduce a novel architecture for next generation passive optical network base on the
Single-carrier Frequency Division Multiple Address (SC-FDMA) technique. Both downstream and
upstream SC-FDMA transmissions are experimentally demonstrated.
Introduction
The passive optical network (PON) is
considered as a promising solution for future
broadband access networks. Due to the growing
bandwidth demand, next-generation PON
technologies at the traffic higher than 10Gb/s
have been widely discussed. Several access
technologies have been proposed, such as Time
Division Multiple Access (TDMA), Wavelength
Division Multiplexing (WDM), Optical Code
Division Multiplexed Access (O-CDMA), and
Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
Access (OFDMA)
1
. Among them, the OFDMA
scheme is impressing for its highest 108Gb/s
single wavelength downstream/upstream data
rate in PON systems
2
.
In this paper, we propose a novel PON
architecture employing the Single-carrier
Frequency Division Multiple Address (SC-FDMA)
technique. The SC-FDMA is a modified form of
OFDMA which has a similar throughput
performance and overall complexity as OFDMA.
SC-FDMA is currently employed for the uplink
multiple access scheme in the Long Term
Evolution (LTE) of cellular systems by the Third
Generation Partnership Project (3GPP)
3
. A
principal advantage of SC-FDMA is the lower
PAPR than that of OFDMA. In this paper, we
show by experiments that SC-FDMA is feasible
for both downstream and upstream PON
transmission.

Technique principle
As a modified form, the baseband digital signal
processing (DSP) method of the SC-FDMA has
much in common with that of the OFDMA. Fig. 1
shows the transmitter and receiver structure for
SC-FDMA. We can see that the only difference
between them is the presence of the discrete
Fourier transform (DFT) in the SC-FDMA
transmitter and the inverse DFT (IDFT) in the
SC-FDMA receiver. For this reason, SC-FDMA
is sometimes referred to as DFT-spread
OFDMA. At the transmitter, the first step to
modulate the SC-FDMA symbol is to perform an
M-point DFT to produce the frequency domain
representation of mapped quadrature amplitude
modulation (QAM) or Phase Shift Keying (PSK)
signals. It then maps each of the M DFT outputs
to one of the N (N> M) orthogonal subcarriers
that can be transmitted. After subcarrier
mapping, an IDFT transforms the subcarriers to
a complex time domain signal. Before the signal
is transmitted, cyclic prefix (CP) is inserted in
order to provide a guard time to prevent inter-
block interference. At the receiver, after CP is
removed from each block, the N-point DFT
transforms the signals into frequency domain
and channel equalization is performed. Unlike
S/P
Data
P/S
Add
CP
LPF
M-point
DFT
N-point
IDFT
Subcarrier
mapping
Transmitted
signal
QAM or
PSK
mapping
(a)
(b)
Fig. 1: DSP block diagrams for (a) the SC-FDMA coder (b) the SC-FDMA decoder
ECOC 2010, 19-23 September, 2010, Torino, Italy
978-1-4244-8535-2/10/$26.00 2010 IEEE
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OFDMA scheme in which decision is performed
in the frequency domain, the equalized SC-
FDMA signal is transformed into time domain by
the M-point IDFT for decision.
We can see that subcarrier mapping enables
spectrum division for different terminals and is
essential for SC-FDMA. The mapping can be
localized or distributed
3
. Fig.2 shows a localized
SC-FDMA scheme for a typical PON
architecture. In OFDMA each optical network
unit (ONU) uses a set of subcarriers to transmit
or receive its data. In SC-FDMA, the ONUs
employ single-carrier transmission, but each
single carrier is frequency-domain shifted to
occupy a specific part of the whole available
bandwidth. For upstream transmission, each
ONU should fill unwanted subcarriers with
zeroes during the subcarrier mapping. Due to
the DFT guaranteed orthogonality, the optical
line terminal (OLT) can simultaneous received
data from all ONUs without inter-subcarrier
interference.
Splitter

Fig. 2: Frequency spectrum division for SCFDMA-PON
Moreover, if the traffic is organized with SC-
FDMA frames, each of which consists of
multiple SC-FDMA symbols, the resource
allocation may be two-dimensional in both
frequency and time domains. The resource
structure can be expressed as shown in Fig. 3.
In cellular applications, SC-FDMA is not
recommended as the downstream technique,
because OFDMA performs better in the
presence of severe multipath signal propagation.
The immunity to multipath derives from the fact
that an OFDMA system transmits information on
multiple orthogonal frequency carriers, which is
more robust against frequency selective fading
than the single-carrier approach. But optical
fibre channel differs from wireless channel. In
this paper, we experimentally verify the
feasibility of SCFDMA-PON with both
downstream and upstream SC-FDMA
transmission.
1
f
SC-FDMA symbol number n
Frequency
Resource Element
n
f

Fig. 3: Basic time-frequency resource structure for SC-
FDMA frame
Experiment Setup
Figure 4 shows the experimental setup to
validate the SCFDMA-PON architecture. The
baseband SC-FDMA signal is generated with
three times upsampling and up-converted to
2.5GHz by digital I-Q modulation in Matlab. The
FFT size is 256 and from which 204 subcarriers
are used for data transmission. The CP size is
16 and QPSK is used for constellation mapping.
The generated waveform is uploaded into a
Tektronix AWG7122B whose waveforms are
continuously output at a sample rate of 10Gs/s
(8 bits DAC), the total bit rate for two ONUs is
5Gb/s (2.5Gb/s for each). An intensity Mach-
Zehnder modulator (MZM) is utilized to convert
the SC-FDMA signal to double-side-band (DSB)
optical signal. The optical distribution network is
(a) (b)
Fig 4: Experimental setup for downstream and upstream SCFDMA-PON (a) transmitter and (b) receiver
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emulated with 22.2 km SSMF, a 10dB optical
attenuator, a variable optical attenuator (VOA)
and a 1:2 splitter. The optical DSB signal is
converted to electrical RF signal by a
photodiode and then is amplified before
sampled by a real-time digital storage
oscilloscope (Tektronix DPO72004B) at the
sampling rate of 25 Gs/s. The sampled data are
decoded in offline process.
For downstream traffic, data from OLT can
be a whole single-carrier band or multiple single-
carrier bands assigned to each ONUs. In the
experiment, the latter case is preferred and two
single-carrier bands for two ONUs are
generated independently and combined in
Matlab. For upstream traffic, the two output
channels of AWG independently modulate two
intensity MZMs to emulate two ONUs traffic. The
downlink laser wavelength is 1550nm while the
uplink ones of ONU-1 and ONU-2 are set to
1550 nm and 1557nm, respectively.
Experiment Results and discussion

(a) (b)

(c) (d)
Fig. 5: Signal spectrums. (a) downstream for ONU1&2; (b)
simultaneous ONU1&2 upstream of SC-FDMA signals; (c)
single ONU1 upstream of SC-FDMA signals; (d) single
ONU2 upstream of SC-FDMA signals.
-19 -18 -17 -16
-6
-5
-4
-3
-2
downstream ONU1
downstream ONU2
l
o
g
B
E
R
Received optical power (dBm)

Fig. 6: SC-FDMA downstream BER performance
Figure 5 shows the received downstream and
upstream SC-FDMA signal spectrum. The 2.6~4
GHz frequency band is assigned to ONU-1,
while the 1~ 2.4GHz frequency band is assigned
to ONU-2. A small guard band about 200MHz is
put between two ONUs signals to minimize the
possible band interference due to nonlinear
conponments. Fig. 6 and Fig. 7 show the bit
error rate (BER) versus received optical power
for downstream and upstream traffic,
respectively. The different BER performance
between the two ONUs upstream comes from
different MZM modulation linearity. And power
plenty of ONU2 upstream between single and
combined transmission is due to the noise floor
of ONU1 upstream.
-20 -19 -18 -17 -16 -15 -14 -13
-6
-5
-4
-3
-2
-1 ONU-2 upstream only
ONU-2 upstream with ONU1
ONU-1 upstream only
ONU-1 upstream with ONU2
l
o
g
B
E
R
Received optical power (dBm)

Fig. 7: SC-FDMA upstream BER performance

Conclusions
We have proposed a novel PON architecture
employing the SC-FDMA technique and showed
the first experimental demonstration of 5Gb/s
optical SCFDMA-PON traffic.
Acknowledgment
This work was supported by National Basic
Research Program of China (973 Program, No.
2010CB328201 and 2010CB328202), National
Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC, No.
60907030, No. 60877045 No. 60932004 and
No.60736003).
References
1. D. Qian, et al, Proc. ECOC07, paper 5.4.1
(2007).
2. D.Qian, et al. Proc. OFC09, paper PDP5
(2009).
3. 3GPP, Technical Specification TR 25.814
V7.1.0 Sep, Release 7,(2006).


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