AbstractOrthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is a special form of multicarrier (MC) modulation technique which is adopted in 4G mobile communication systems. The combination of OFDM with passive optical network (PON) architecture is highly desirable for design of flexible and energy efficient backhaul and backbone networks for 5G systems. An intensive mathematical model for linewidth analysis in OFDM based backhaul (BH) and backbone (BB) systems is proposed. The proposed mathematical model includes fiber dispersion, fiber nonlinear effects, amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise, transmitter and receiver noises. The impact of laser linewidth in the developed analytical model is analysed in terms phase rotation term (PRT) and inter-carrier interference (ICI) power. Further, the BER performance of the DD-OFDM system as a function of laser linewidth is also presented. The results of the analytical model solved using MATLAB is compared with virtual photonics integrated (VPI) based simulation results. The results of our proposed model suggest that DD-OFDM would perform better for lower linewidth in dispersion uncompensated (DUC) links and it has no impact on the dispersion compensated (DC) links for BB networks. In BH networks, the system performs better for lower linewidth in both DUC and DC links.