Auto bias control technique for optical OFDM transmitter with bias dithering

In coherent optical communication systems, the transmitter usually employs an optical in-phase and quadrature (IQ) modulator to perform electrical-to-optical up-conversion. However, some environmental factors, such as temperature and mechanical stress, strongly influence the stability. To stabilize the quality of the transmitted signal, auto bias control (ABC) is essential to keep modulator in optimum bias. In this paper, we present a novel method of ABC for the optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (O-OFDM) signal. In the proposed scheme, a small cosine/sine wave dither signal is added on to the I/Q baseband signal, respectively. Based on the power monitoring of the 1st and 2nd harmonics of the dither signal, the biases of the optical IQ modulator for O-OFDM system can be adjusted very precisely. The simulation and experimental results show good performance on locating the optimum bias voltages for the IQ modulator with high precision.