Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) is attractive to accommodate the increasing demands for various multimedia services. There have been substantial interests in implementing FTTH using wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) passive optical network (PON) architecture. This is because WDM PON could provide large transmission capacity, network security, and upgradability. However, for the practical implementation of WDM PON, it is essential to develop cost-effective light sources operating at different wavelength for each subscriber. Recently, it has been proposed to use the Fabry-Perot laser injection-locked to the spectrum-sliced amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) light for this application. However, these lasers could have high relative intensity noise (RIN) since they use the incoherent and broadband ASE as a master light source.
In this thesis, we evaluated the performance of the Fabry-Perot laser injection-locked to the spectrum-sliced ASE light theoretically and experimentally. The results show that, due to the increased relative intensity noise (RIN), the maximum data rate achievable by using this light source was limited to 1.25 Gb/s. However, when this light source was used in a WDM PON with 32 channels, the maximum upstream rate for each subscriber would be limited to only 155 Mb/s due to the reduced ASE power injected to the Fabry-Perot laser. To overcome this limitation, we proposed to use the spectrum-sliced optical frequency comb (generated by modulating a laser with RF signal) instead of the spectrum-sliced ASE light for the injection locking of a Fabry-Perot laser. Using the proposed light source, it was possible to increase the upstream data rate to 2.5 Gb/s in the WDM PON with 32 channels.
