Timing asynchronism strongly degrades the performance of analog network coded (ANC) bi-directional transmission. This letter investigates receiver design for asynchronous broadband bi-directional transmission over frequency selective fading channels. Based on time domain oversampling, we propose fractionally spaced frequency domain minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizers for bi-directional ANC based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) and cyclic prefixed single carrier (CP-SC) radio access. Simulation results show that the proposed fractionally spaced equalizer (FSE) can eliminate the negative effect of timing misalignment in bi-directional transmissions.

A bi-directional WDM transmission link that changes the channel-count assigned in each direction is proposed for efficiently accommodating IP traffic which is characterized by directional volume asymmetry. A novel bi-directional optical amplifier is also proposed for overcoming the problems that arise in realizing the proposed link. The asymmetric, bi-directional, repeatered WDM transmission of 8 (total) 10 Gbit/s, 50 GHz-spaced channels over eleven 50 km spans is successfully demonstrated. The experimental results clarify that, owing to the use of the proposed bi-directional amplifier, directional asymmetry in channel-count and Rayleigh backscattering do not result in any significant performance degradation. Based upon an analysis of backscattering induced impairment, we show that the total transmission loss of 1000 dB can be supported if the span loss is 20 dB.