Improvement of fiber optic system performance by synchronous phase modulation and filtering at the transmitter

In this dissertation the performance of a novel variant of a return-to-zero (RZ) modulation format, based on square-wave phase modulation and filtering of a continuous-wave (CW) signal, is investigated and compared with various modulation formats considered in the literature. We call this modulation format continuous-wave square-wave (CWSW). With CWSW an RZ pulse train is generated by phase modulating the CW signal by a periodic square-wave phase function having an amplitude of pi/2 and frequency of half the bit rate, and then filtering the signal. The filter performs phase-to-amplitude conversion, resulting in an alternate-sign RZ pulse train, which is shown to be resistant to fiber dispersion. The alternate-sign RZ pulse train is then amplitude modulated with the data before the transmission. Alternate signs between adjacent pulses makes this signal format robust to impairments caused by the optical fiber, similar to a conventional alternate-sign RZ signal format. However, the unique property of the CWSW signal format is that individual pulses can induce peak intensity enhancement (PIE), a phenomenon by which the peak of a pulse increases during the initial propagation in the presence of dispersion. The PIE in effect delays the decrease in the pulse peak, which represents the signal level for bit 1. Thus, the eye opening at the receiver is improved. An analytically tractable model is developed to explain the occurrence of the PIE, which cannot be achieved with a conventional pulse shape. The sources of performance degradations for different modulation formats in single-channel 40 Gb/s systems are also discussed in this dissertation. Various transmission system configurations of practical interest are considered and the performance of CWSW is compared with alternative modulation formats. It is found that the CWSW signal format performs significantly better than the other considered modulation formats in systems not employing dispersion compensation and is comparable to the others in dispersion-managed systems. Furthermore, the transmitter configuration of the CWSW signal format is simpler than the other approaches.