Spectrally efficient polarization multiplexed direct-detection OFDM system without frequency gap

We experimentally demonstrate a spectrally efficient direct-detection orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (DD-OFDM) system. In addition to polarization-division multiplexing, removing the frequency gap further improves the spectral efficiency of the OFDM system. The frequency gap between a reference carrier and OFDM subcarriers avoids subcarrier-to-subcarrier beating interference (SSBI) in traditional DD-OFDM systems. Without dynamic polarization control, the resulting interference after square-law direct detection in the proposed gap-less system is polarization-dependent and composed of linear inter-carrier interference (ICI) and nonlinear SSBI. Thus, this work proposes an iterative multiple-input multiple-output detection scheme to remove the mixed polarization-dependent interference. Compared to the previous scheme, which only removes ICI, the proposed scheme can further eliminate SSBI to achieve the improvement of ∼ 7 dB in signal-to-noise ratio. Without the need for polarization control, we successfully utilize 7-GHz bandwidth to transmit a 39.5-Gbps polarization multiplexed OFDM signal over 100 km.