OLT Receiver for Power Normalization of Burst OFDM Signals Enabling OFDM/TDMA-PON

An optical line terminal receiver, composed of an optical gain-control stage based on an optical coherent detection followed by an electrical front-end amplifier, is verified to be able to normalize upstream burst orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals with different power levels, thus alleviating a substantial limiting factor in OFDM/time division multiplexing access-passive optical network (PON) system development. A receiver dynamic range of 25 dB and system power budget of 29 dB are achieved. Experiments confirm that the receiver meets the linearity requirement posed by OFDM signals while satisfying the dynamic range and power budget specified by the current PON standards.