Characterization of Rayleigh backscattering performance of CS-SSB signal in carrier distributed passive optical network

Rayleigh backscattering (RB) is an intrinsic phenomenon when light propagating in fiber and its level is fixed by the fiber type and the network configuration used. Thus, RB noise would be one of the major impairments in a carrier distributed passive optical network (PON). Previously demonstrated carrier suppressed subcarrier-amplitude modulated phase shift keying (CSS-AMPSK) modulation may be useful to effectively mitigate the RB noise. However, this modulation is basically a carrier suppressed double sidebands modulation (CS-DSB) format, in which the same information is carried by the two sidebands with equal magnitude. This is not very power-efficient for PON. Here, we further extend our RB studies by using carrier suppressed single sideband non-return-to-zero (CS-SSB-NRZ) modulation. We experimentally characterize the CS-SSB-NRZ modulation when subjected to both contributions of RB: Carrier-RB and Signal-RB. Then, numerical simulations are performed, and the results are in good match with the experiment. Finally, upstream transmission experiment is performed showing the feasibility of using the CS-SSB-NRZ signal for the carrier distributed PON. The RB performance of the SSB-NRZ signals transmitted at different distances and driven at different radio-frequency (RF) f_s is also investigated.