LAUSR

Abstract The inherent nonlinear effects associated to Semiconductor Optical Amplifiers (SOAs) may translate into a transmission performance loss for non-constant envelope modulation formats. However, a variety of linearization schemes may be adopted for coping with these impairments and offering an effective system design. In this paper, an envelope tracking (ET) technique is investigated for linearizing an SOA-based Coherent Optical OFDM transmitter. An optimized design of the ET subsystem is performed under various scenarios, with the eventual joint use of Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) reduction either via hard-clipping or nonlinear companding. A thorough carrier density analysis is performed in the amplifier, for various target gain values, so as to assess the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Moreover, we investigate the robustness of the proposed approach against some parameters variation both inside the ET path (DAC characteristics and bandwidth limited envelope generation). Extensive simulations performed with a precise SOA model show that up to 8 dB (resp. 7 dB) BER improvement can be achieved via the proposed scheme in the case of 4-QAM/OFDM (resp. 16-QAM/OFDM), compared to the conventional system with no linearization, and that even an envelope quantized with 2 bits still enables a significant performance increase.