| This work is to investigate the statistical properties of the filtered amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise in an erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) pre-amplified receiver system, as the optical bandwidth approaches the electrical bandwidth. The theoretical derivation and analysis of a non-Gaussian noise theory is presented and compared to the widely used Gaussian approximation. The theoretical model includes both the ASE beat noises and the post detection Gaussian noises. Simulation of the probability density function (PDF), bit error ratio (BER), receiver sensitivity and optimum percentage threshold are done to study the differences between the Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise theory. Experiments are performed to measure the noise distribution, the optimum percentage threshold and BER. The experimental results are compared to the Gaussian and non-Gaussian noise theory. Optical filters with 3 dB bandwidth of 0.1, 0.2 and 0.4 nm are used in the experiments. |
