Advantages of the use of VCSEL over RSOA for uplink

transmission on WDM-PON networks

G. Arvalo and D. Crdenas, Member, IEEE
Abstract The present paper compares and discusses the
advantages, disadvantages and performance of the principal
tendencies presented in the last researches made around the topic
of the WDM-PON networks, focusing in those aiming to achieve
high data rate transmission in the uplink channels. By means of
simulation models, it is demonstrated that VCSELs have some
remarkable advantages over RSOAs particularly in high data rate
per channel WDM-PON transmissions.

Index Terms Wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM),

passive optical networks (PONs), optical network unit (ONU),
vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL), reflective
semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA).

I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, WDM-PON networks constitute one of the
most promising technologies for the development of high
bandwidth access networks due to its potential for costeffectiveness and energy-efficiency. Therefore, WDM-PON
has been a very popular topic of research in recent years due
to the many unresolved problems that are currently being
confronted in the development of these kind of networks,
especially those related with cost-effectiveness at high-speed
errorless data transmission [1,2].
Next generation passive optical networks (NG-PONs) will
require data rates beyond 10 Gb/s [3], and one of the most
challenging problems related
with the commercial
deployment of these networks, is the development of lowcost and high-speed user optical terminal equipment at the
optical network unit (ONU) side. The downlink transmission
is less cost-sensitive than the uplink since the former
depends on the optical line terminal (OLT) equipment and
the latter depends on the ONU equipment. It also should be
taken into account the strong requirement of colorless
solutions for the light source in the ONU. Therefore, there
are mainly three alternatives for the uplink transmission in a
WDM-PON: the use of tunable lasers, the spectrum slicing
of a common broadband light source (BLS) and the
remodulation of the downstream signal through the use of a
reflective modulator [4,5].
This article is organized as follows: in Section II we
analyze the most common research tendencies that are
G. Arvalo
is with Universidad Politcnica Salesiana Telecommunications Research Group, Quito, Ecuador
(e-mail:
garevalo@ups.edu.ec).
D. Crdenas is with Universidad San Francisco
de Quito Telecommunications Research Group, Quito, Ecuador
(e-mail:
dcardenas@usfq.edu.ec)

focused mainly in the achievement of high data rates in

WDM-PON networks through the use of ONU's low-cost
equipment. Section III discusses
the performance and
advantages of two of the most popular devices proposed for
colorless high bit rate data transmission in WDM-PONs and
also describes the test bench used for simulating these
systems. Then, Section IV presents and discusses the results
obtained from these simulations and finally, Section V draws
some conclusions about this work.
II. PRINCIPAL TENDENCIES FOR THE UPLINK TRANSMISSION
A. Spectrum slicing of a broadband light source
Due to the fact that the cost of the BLS is shared among
all the users of the network, in many proposed solutions the
use of a continuous wave (CW) BLS has been popular in
order to provide a seed light source for the ONU's injectionlocked optical transmitters. However these kind of sources
present a low power spectral bandwidth and high relative
intensity noise (RIN) which limits the data rate of the uplink
to around 1 Gb/s [6,7,8]. The BLS is usually implemented
by an erbium doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) or two or more
cascaded EDFAs.
It is also possible to use not just one BLS but many light
sources in order to reduce the power consumption but with
increase of the cost, e.g. [9] proposes a WDM-PON network
that saves more than half of the optical pump power and
improves the system power budget due to the use of two
multi-wavelength light sources each consisting of an EDFA
with many cascaded selective wavelength reflectors.
B. Reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers
Relating to the remodulation of the downstream signal in
the ONU, one of the most popular devices for providing a
colorless solution is the reflective semiconductor optical
amplifier (RSOA). The main advantage of the use of RSOAs
is that they permit to save the cost of a light source in the
ONU. Nevertheless, the main drawback is its relatively low
spectral bandwidth, typically below 2.5 GHz in current
commercial devices, which limits the data rate of the uplink
channel to typically no more than 2.5 Gb/s for a distance of
up to 20 km if any kind of dispersion compensation or
forward error correction (FEC) of the data is used. Fig. 1
presents a typical RSOA based WDM-PON network.
Provided that the RSOA permits transmitting the upstream
data with high power levels, the reach of the network can be
increased if the data rate is kept below the limits introduced
by the bandwidth, noise, wavelength-detuning, polarization
dependent gain
(PDG) and chirp-related dispersion

978-1-4673-5080-8/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

are not reported WDM-PONs, using this solution, able to

transmit with data rates beyond 2.5 Gb/s.

..
.

MUX/DEM

X
X/DEMU

U
X

MU
.. .

Figure 1. Schematic diagram of a WDM-PON with a RSOA based ONU.

OLT: optical line transmitter; RN: remote node; ONU: optical network unit;
Rx-PD: reception photodiode; RSOA: reflective semiconductor optical
amplifier.

introduced by the RSOA. Previous works of bidirectional

2.5 Gb/s long-reach WDM-PON systems using self-injection
locked Fabry-Perot laser diode (FP-LD) as
a CW light
source for a RSOA have been proposed [10,11]. Such
systems achieved
errorless data
transmission, through
distances beyond 70 km, using no special modulation
techniques but the simple on-off keying (OOK) modulation.
By means of special modulation techniques, e.g.
differential phase shift keying
(DPSK), differential
quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK) or polarization
multiplexing (POLMUX), it has been reported RSOA based
WDM-PON networks able to transmit with data rates equal
or greater than 10 Gb/s in 20 km links [12,13], or even
much higher speeds and longer links with the use of
dispersion compensation [14] or signal equalization
alternatively combined with FEC for further improvement
[15,16]. However, these high data rates are obtained through
an increment in the complexity of the ONU, which may
result in higher costs, and usually with considerable power
penalties, e.g. there is a 10 dB power penalty in a DPSK
based transmission due to the balance detection required for
the conversion of the OOK signal in a DPSK signal [12].
Due to the fact that the RSOA must work in the gain
saturation region, the power budget of the network must be
increased in order to have enough received power at the
ONU and thus keeping the RSOA working in a partially
saturated regime. Besides, the extinction ratio (ER) in the
downstream transmission must be low in order to permit a
zero level power high enough to keep the saturation
condition. A proposal for having an ER of the downstream
signal as high as 9 dB in a 1.25 Gb/s RSOA based ONU,
thanks to the use of decision threshold level adjustment
technique, is presented in [17].
Some other techniques can be used for improving the
RSOA based uplink transmissions, like the variation of the
wavelength detuning on the upstream transmission [18] and
the use of subcarriers to avoid the uplink-downlink crosstalk
caused by the wavelength reuse [19,20] but the reported data
rates in those systems are not beyond 2.5 Gb/s. The use of an
injection-locked electro-absorption
transceiver (EAT),
instead of the RSOA, improves the polarization sensitivity of
the transmission [21]. To the best of our knowledge, there

C. Vertical cavity surface emitting lasers

There are many options for using a colorless light source
in the ONU, like distributed feedback brag-reflector laser
diodes (DFB-LDs) or external cavity lasers (ECLs), which
can be driven directly or use an external modulator.
However, currently they are far from being cost-effective for
massive commercial deployment.
In recent years, the use of vertical cavity surface emitting
lasers (VCSELs) has been increasingly popular since it
constitutes a low cost enough solution in order to be a
profitable option for commercial development of ONU's
transmission equipment. A well known
case of the
successful use of the VCSEL, for a 1.25 Gb/s transmission,
is the so called "Gigabit access passive optical network
using wavelength division multiplexing" (GigaWaM) project
[22].
In the research work described in [23] an errorless 10
Gb/s transmission with the use of a directly modulated
VCSEL, without special
modulation techniques nor
dispersion compensation, through a 20 km length WDMPON network is reported. In that network, such high data
rate is achieved by compensating the data spectrum
frequency shift caused by the high chirp of the VCSEL (high
when compared with other kind of lasers) by means of the
change of the center-frequency of the WDM optical filters in
order to adjust it to the variation caused by the shifting. Fig.
2 shows a typical VCSEL based WDM-PON network.
III. ADVANTAGES OF THE VCSEL OVER THE RSOA
As it can be inferred from the previous section, the use of
VCSELs presents many advantages when compared with the
RSOA. One of the most remarkable of the advantages is the
capacity of the VCSEL to achieve bit rates equal or greater
than 10 Gb/s, using only OOK direct modulation, whereas
the RSOA, due to its lower spectral range, requires the use
of complex data processing techniques in order to be capable
to transmit beyond 2.5 Gb/s bit rate. Besides, there is
typically much more chirp inserted in the RSOA's
remodulated data than in the VCSEL's directly transmitted
data.

Figure 2. Schematic diagram of a WDM-PON with a VCSEL based ONU.

VCSEL: vertical cavity surface emiting laser; M/D: multiplexing /
demultiplexing.

Through the use of injection locking, the VCSEL can

work as a wide range tunable laser, constituting a colorless
solution for 10 Gb/s uplink transmission as described in
[24]. Thus, it presents the advantage that the wavelength of
the upstream data can be easily changed so to avoid the
typical crosstalk effect existent
in the RSOA's based
transmission, caused by the reuse of the wavelength of the
downstream transmission in order to be used in the upstream
transmission. On the other hand however, this could limit the
number of wavelengths available for WDM channels.
With the purpose of
analyzing and comparing the
behavior of the high data rate uplink transmissions using
VCSELs and RSOAs in WDM-PONs, we reproduced the
networks presented in Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 using the simulation
software OptSim. The test-bench set up in the simulation
consists on a WDM-PON network with various ONUs and
100 GHz channel spacing according to the ITU grid, and
standard single mode fiber (SSMF) with a fixed 20 km
length, since it is the typical distance of a traditional PON.
The dispersion of the fiber was set to 17 ps/km/nm and the
fiber loss was set to 0.25 dB/km. Data of currently available
commercial devices were used for the parameter settings of
the VCSEL and RSOA. The receivers consisted of PIN
photodiodes with a responsivity of 0.98 A/W with electrical
post amplification and base band filtering. Fig. 3 and Fig. 4
show the characteristic curves of the VCSEL and the RSOA
used in the network. In order to take into account the penalty
introduced by the cross talk effects, a bidirectional optical
fiber model was used. Such model considers the Raman and
the Rayleigh backscattering effect for a bidirectional
transmission [25]. It was not considered any kind of
dispersion compensation in the simulations.
In [26] it has been demonstrated that adiabatic and
transient chirp introduced by the VCSEL have considerable
impact at high bit rate transmissions. Thus, in the OptSim
test-bench for the simulation a linewidth enhancement factor
(alpha) of 0.1 was considered for the VCSEL. This factor
is used by the software to evaluate the phase rate equation of
the laser [27].
In OptSim, the frequency chirp is computed directly from
the input optical signal using the following equation [27]:
s @
: ;LF
Frequency Chirp Hz
t@P

(1)

where is the phase in units of radians.

The OLT was based on arrays of VCSELs and PIN
photodiodes, tuned to the correspondent downlink/uplink
wavelengths, respectively. In order
to have
relatively
uniform templates, for comparison purposes, the same
settings in the OLT for the VCSEL's network and for the
RSOA's network were applied. Also, the data transmission
was performed without using dispersion compensation, FEC
or any kind of additional data processing. Therefore, the
behavior of the uplink transmission was defined exclusively
by the characteristics of the ONU's devices.

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

Due to the different spectral range and chirp conditions of
the employed RSOA and VCSEL, it was not possible to get
errorless transmissions (i.e. < 1e-9) beyond 2.5 Gb/s with the
RSOA, therefore we report its results at this bit rate. On the
other hand instead, by using the VCSELs it was possible to
transmit up to 10 Gb/s for a BER equal or greater than 1e-9
as it is explained later. Results for the VCSEL network are
thus reported for 10 Gb/s. The chirp measured under
working conditions for the VCSEL and the RSOA is
presented in Fig. 5 and Fig. 6. Notice that the RSOA's chirp
(about 16 GHz peak to peak chirp and about 7 GHZ
adiabatic chirp) is bigger than the VCSELs chirp (<13 GHz
peak to peak chirp and <5GHz adiabatic chirp).

Figure 3. Gain characteristic curve of the RSOAs used in the WDM-PON

Figure 4. PI characteristic curve of the VCSELs used in the WDM-PON

Scan 2chirp1 Itr 21 Signal Plot
x109
38
36
z)H 34
p ( 32
r
Chi 30
yquenc
28
26
e 24
rF 22
20
0

10
x10-9

Time (s)
x polarization

Figure 5. Measured a) transmitted signal (dashed) and b) generated chirp

(solid) for the RSOA working at 2.5 Gb/s.

Scan 2chirp1 Itr 21 Signal Plot

called) to pass from a 2.5 Gb/s RSOA's transmission to a 10

Gb/s VCSEL's transmission is near 2 dB. And also notice
that the penalty gets lower as the BER is improved, e.g. for a
BER equal to 10 -12 the power penalty reduces to slightly
more than 1 dB, i.e. there is a very close performance, when
using OOK modulation, between a 2.5 Gb/s RSOA and a 10
Gb/s VCSEL.

x10 9
38
36
)z
H
(
p
ir
Ch
y
nc
ue
eq
Fr

34
32
30
28

The BER equal to 1e-9 is also evident from the good eye
diagram aperture; we include in Fig. 8 the eye diagrams of
the uplink transmissions made with a RSOA and with a
VCSEL (at 2.5 Gb/s and 10 Gb/s respectively) for 20 km
fiber length.

26
24
22
20
0

3
x10 -9

Time (s)

Figure 6. Measured a) transmitted signal (dashed) and b) generated chirp

(solid) for the VCSEL working at 10 Gb/s.

3
4
R)
BE 5
(g
6
o
7
-l
8
9
10
11
12
-32

10 Gb/s VCSEL 20 km
10 Gb/s VCSEL B to B
2.5 Gb/s RSOA 20 km
2.5 Gb/s RSOA B to B
-30

-28

-26
-24
-22
Received power (dBm)

-20

-18

-16

Figure 7. BER versus power at the receiver for the RSOA and the VCSEL

The analysis in this paper is based on the observed

upstream transmission results. In both, the VCSEL and the
RSOA settings, the transmissions were made back to back
(B to B) and with a 20 km length fiber feeder. Fig. 7 shows
the BER versus optical received power for 2.5 Gb/s RSOA's
uplink transmissions and for 10 Gb/s VCSEL's uplink
transmissions. Here can be observed that, for a BER of 1e-9
and a 20 km length link, the power penalty (if it can be so

(A)

V. CONCLUSION
We analyzed and compared the performances of the
current research tendencies for the achievement of colorless
low cost solutions, able to perform well at high bit data rates,
in WDM-PON uplink transmissions
without dispersion
compensation or any kind of digital signal processing
techniques, specifically the systems based on RSOA and
VCSEL. However, the use of RSOAs as uplink transmitters
with traditional OOK is limited up to 2.5 Gb/s in commercial
devices due to
its relatively low spectral bandwidth.
Advanced techniques of modulation and data signal
processing can be used to increase their capacity. On the
other hand, the use of directly modulated VCSELs (OOK) is
interesting for beyond 10 Gb/s WDM-PONs. The results
obtained by means of software simulation for a link of 20
km, show that the VCSEL has a better performance than
RSOA at very high bit rates and it constitutes a good
alternative for the development of cost-effective transmitter
implementation in the
next generation passive optical
networks. It opens a large track of investigation related with
the performance and enhancements of this type of solutions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We thank Universidad Politcnica Salesiana of Ecuador
for the funding received to perform this research.

(B)

Figure 8. Eye diagrams of uplink transmissions in a 20 km link and with a BER of 1e-9, (A) 10 Gb/s VCSEL (B) 2.5 Gb/s RSOA

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