This paper describes briefly the development background and present conditions of all-optical Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing(OFDM) technology and summarizes the generation technologies for all-optical continuous and discrete OFDM signals.The all-optical continuous OFDM technology generates flat
stable
orthogonal and low-phase-noise comb spectrum
while the all-optical discrete OFDM technology realizes Optical Inverse Discrete Fourier Transform(OIDFT) and Optical Discrete Fourier Transform(ODFT) by using optical devices and methods.Compared with all-optical continuous OFDM technology
all-optical discrete OFDM technology is more scalable.