Subcarriers-to-subcarriers beating interference cancellation in virtual single sideband optical frequency division multiplexing system

We propose and experimentally demonstrate the superior performance of a 40-Gbps 16-quadrature amplitude modulation virtual single sideband (VSSB) direct detection optical frequency division multiplexing system with symbol predistortion to mitigate subcarriers-to-subcarriers beating interference. The VSSB signal is generated in the electronic domain by combining the baseband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing signals and sinusoidal waves without a frequency gap to maximize the electrical and optical spectral efficiencies. The results show that 5-dB optical signal to noise ratio sensitivity improvement is obtained by using symbol predistortion.