Performance improvement of a directly modulated 10 Gb/s OFDM system by optical injection of monolithically integrated lasers is shown experimentally over differing fibre lengths. The modulation and optical injection is performed using monolithically integrated Discrete Mode lasers. It is shown that optical injection with this device reduces third order inter-modulation distortion by up to 10dB and this results in an improvement in system performance from above a forward error correction BER threshold of 1 × 10(-3) to significantly below it.
© 2011 Optical Society of America