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Demonstration of flexible optical time-division multiplexing system for high-speed free-space optical communications

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Abstract

A high-speed free-space optical communication scheme based on optical time-division multiplexing (OTDM) is experimentally demonstrated. By multiplexing eight 2.5Gb/s base-rate signals, which is generated from a repetition-tunable actively mode-locked fiber ring laser modulated by pseudo-random binary sequence data stream, a 20Gb/s OTDM packet is obtained. After 50 m high-speed FSO system transmission, the 20Gb/s OTDM packet is injected into a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) loop to realize polarization-insensitive de-multiplexing based on four-wave mixing (FWM). Experimental results show that the OTDM de-multiplexer bit error rate (BER) can achieve 10−9 level with steady operation over 24 h, proving the practicality of this system.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grants: 61231012, and 60907026).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Transient Optics and Photonics, Xi’an Institute of Optics and Precision Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an, 710119, China

    Hui Hu, Fengchen Qian, Xiaoping Xie, Tao Duan & Huan Feng

  2. Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Hui Hu, Fengchen Qian & Huan Feng

  3. The School of Science, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710106, China

    Hui Hu

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  1. Hui Hu
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  2. Fengchen Qian
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  3. Xiaoping Xie
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  4. Tao Duan
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  5. Huan Feng
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Correspondence to Tao Duan.

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Hu, H., Qian, F., Xie, X. et al. Demonstration of flexible optical time-division multiplexing system for high-speed free-space optical communications. J Opt 45, 1–6 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12596-016-0318-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12596-016-0318-5

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