OFDM for Optical Communications

Chapter 12 Future Research Directions

12.1 Introduction

Optical orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has received significant attention from the optical communication community, and it has certainly demonstrated its potential to permeate broad ranges of applications across every level of the optical networks, from long-haul to metro, access, and home networks. There may be some sideline debate about the superiority of the optical OFDM versus the single-carrier system, but the rapidly increasing interest in optical OFDM is ushering in a new era of software-defined optical communication (SDOT) in which various functionalities, such as optical dispersion mitigation, channel estimation, phase estimation, performance monitoring, bandwidth ...