Multi-wavelength coherent transmission using an optical frequency comb as a local oscillator

Steadily increasing data rates of optical interfaces require spectrally efficient coherent transmission using higher-order modulation formats in combination with scalable wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) schemes. At the transmitter, optical frequency combs (OFC) lend themselves to particularly precise multi-wavelength sources for WDM transmission. In this work we demonstrate that these advantages can also be leveraged at the receiver by using an OFC as a highly scalable multi-wavelength local oscillator (LO) for coherent detection. In our experiments, we use a pair of OFC that rely on gain switching of injection-locked semiconductor lasers both for WDM transmission and intradyne reception. We synchronize the center frequency and the free spectral range of the receiver comb to the transmitter, keeping the intradyne frequencies for all data channels below 15 MHz. Using 13 WDM channels, we transmit an aggregate line rate (net data rate) of 1.104 Tbit/s (1.032 Tbit/s) over a 10 km long standard single mode fiber at a spectral efficiency of 5.16 bit/s/Hz. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of coherent WDM transmission using synchronized frequency combs as light source at the transmitter and as multi-wavelength LO at the receiver.