Noise and jitter analysis for wavelength division multiplexing optical heterodyne PSK receivers

Abstract

Performance analysis of optical heterodyne receivers in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) has been an important research area in the last few years. WDM can potentially provide hundreds of Gb/s channels in the same fiber. However, because of channel interference in WDM, performance analysis is important to design the system properly. In this thesis, a detailed noise and jitter analysis has been performed for an optical heterodyne PSK receiver used in WDM. In WDM, noise sources include shot noise, channel interference noise, and phase noise. These noise sources will not only add to the signal, but also cause timing jitter at the bit timing recovery. Expressions for the noise and jitter variances at the detector input are derived for both RZ and NRZ signals. Bit error probabilities as a function of WDM channel separation are computed. It is found that the overall bit error rate performance of RZ is better than NRZ.