BER impairment due to laser linewidth in OFDM-OOK systems using double-cavity Fabry-Perot demultiplexers

We report on the impact of finite laser linewidth on the bit error rate (BER) performance in directly detected optical frequency-division multiple-access (OFDMA) employing double-cavity Fabry-Perot (FP) filters. Three different double-cavity FP demultiplexers have been considered in this study. Also the laser linewidth impairment on the crosstalk probability mass functions, the crosstalk power penalties and the OFDMA network capacity are calculated. The results demonstrate that, even though these demultiplexing schemes are much superior than single-cavity FP filters for highly coherent sources (laser linewidth lower than a few megahertz), when laser linewidth increases this feature appears to be much less significant due to the severe impairment of the laser linewidth on the BER performance, specially for structures with higher optical filter finesse.