In this Letter, an efficient bidirectional differential phase-shift keying (DPSK)-DPSK transmission for a ultradense wavelength division-multiplexed passive optical network is proposed. A single distributed feedback laser at the optical network unit (ONU) is used both as the local laser for downlink coherent detection and the optical carrier for uplink. Phase-shift keying is generated using a low-cost reflective semiconductor optical amplifier (RSOA) at the ONU. The RSOA chip has the bandwidth of 4.7 GHz at the maximum input power and bias current. For uplink transmission, the sensitivity of the RSOA chip reaches -48.2 dBm at the level of bit error rate = 10(-3) for back-to-back, and the penalty for 50 km transmission is less than 1 dB when using polarization diversity.

Peer Reviewed