Compensation for I/Q imbalances and bias deviation of the Mach-Zehnder modulators in direct-detected optical OFDM systems

Abstract

We demonstrate an equalization technique to simultaneously compensate for the fiber chromatic dispersion and the distortions induced by the in-phase/quadrature-phase (I/Q) imbalances and bias deviation in the Mach-Zehnder modulators (MZMs). With this technique, the requirement for the monitoring circuits at the transmitter could be relaxed or even eliminated, and thus simplifies the system design and reduces the system cost. The system exhibits a good performance with our proposal over a broad range of imbalances and bias deviation in the MZM. With deliberately introducing I/Q imbalances and bias deviation, we have observed a 2- and 4-dB optical signal-to-noise ratio improvement, for the back-to-back and 800 km of uncompensated standard single-mode fiber transmission, respectively, with our proposed scheme. © 2009 IEEE.