Enabling Technologies for Direct Detection Optical Phase Modulation Formats

Phase modulation formats are believed to be one of the key enabling techniques for next generation high speed long haul fiber-optic communication systems due to the following main advantages: (1) with a balanced detection, a better receiver sensitivity over conventional intensity modulation formats, e.g., a ∼3-dB sensitivity improvement using differential phase shift keying (DPSK) and a ∼1.3-dB sensitivity improvement using differential quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK); (2) excellent robustness against fiber nonlinearities; (3) high spectrum efficiency when using multilevel phase modulation formats, such as DQPSK. As the information is encoded in the phase of the optical field, the phase modulation formats are sensitive to the phase-related impairments and the deterioration induced in the phase-intensity conversion. This consequently creates new challenging issues. The research objective of this thesis is to depict some of the challenging issues and provide possible solutions.;The second challenge is the polarization dependent frequency shift (PDf) induced penalty during the phase-intensity conversion. The direct detection DPSK is usually demodulated in a Mach-Zehnder delay interferometer (DI). The polarization dependence of DI introduces a PDf causing a frequency offset between the laser's frequency and the transmissivity peak of DI, degrading the demodulated DPSK signal. We found that PDf ratio, defined as PDf/FSR, plays a predominant role in determining the performance of the demodulator. We further investigate on the PDf induced penalty for a 40-GHz DPSK demodulator on a 40-Gb/s return-to-zero (RZ)-DPSK signal to study PDf incurred optical filtering effect and spectrum distortion. Degradation for the RZ signal has been found in the presence the PDf.;The third challenge is fiber dispersion induced inter-symbol interference for the phase modulated signals. Traditionally the dispersion is compensated using dispersion compensation fibers (DCF). Recently emerged electronic dispersion compensation (EDC) not only avoids the attenuation that would be introduced by DCF, but also is capable of simultaneously compensating the chromatic dispersion (CD) and polarization mode dispersion (PMD). We investigate on EDC's CD and PMD compensation capabilities for the direct detection return-to-zero (NRZ)-DPSK signal. The simulation results show that around 300-ps/nm CD and 10-ps differential group delay (DGD) can be compensated by employing EDC. However, compared with the on-off keying (OOK) signal, the EDC is actually less effective with the DPSK signal. The investigation is extended to the RZ-DPSK signal and found out the decision feedback equalizer (DFE) exhibits better performance with the RZ-DPSK signal.;The first challenge is the cross-phase modulation (XPM) penalty for the phase modulated channels co-propagating with the intensity modulated channels. The penalty comes from the pattern dependent intensity fluctuations of the neighboring intensity modulated channels being converted into phase noise in the phase modulation channels. We propose a model to theoretically analyze the XPM penalty dependence on the walk off effect. From this model, we suggest that using fibers with large local dispersion or intentionally introducing some residual dispersion per span would help mitigate the XPM penalty.