Demonstration of a low-complexity real-time FBMC transmitter for a spectral-efficiency IMDD system

Filter bank multi-carriers (FBMC) have higher spectral efficiency, lower out-of-band spectrum leakage, and stronger ability to resist synchronization errors compared to orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), which has been widely considered as a promising solution for short-reach applications, such as passive optical networks. However, the traditional fast Fourier transform (FFT)-based FBMC scheme has quite high implementation complexity for high-speed optical communications. In this work, we proposed a low-complexity real-time FBMC transmitter scheme enabled by a single fully parallel pruned inverse FFT and simplified short prototype filter-based polyphase networks for a low-cost intensity-modulation and direct-detection (IMDD) system. Compared to the OFDM transmitter, the proposed FBMC one occupies a similar number of look-up tables and registers but saves 21% of real multipliers, reduces latency by 16.2%, and increases the data rate by 12.5%. The real-time FBMC/OFDM signals are generated with a field programmable gate array chip and 6-bit 30-GSa/s digital-to-analog converter and are experimentally demonstrated in an IMDD system. After a 20-km standard single-mode fiber transmission, the negligible power penalty can be achieved with the proposed FBMC transmitter scheme at the bit error rate of 3.8e-3 compared to the OFDM counterpart.