IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO.

13, JULY 1, 2007

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Behavior of MLSE-EDC With Self-Phase Modulation Limitations and Various Dispersion Levels in 10.7-Gb/s NRZ and Duobinary Signals
John D. Downie, Jason Hurley, and Michael Sauer
AbstractWe investigate experimentally the effectiveness of maximum likelihood sequence estimation electronic dispersion compensation (MLSE-EDC) for signals limited by self-phase modulation (SPM) and with various dispersion levels. We study nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) and duobinary signals modulated at 10.7 Gb/s and nd that the improvement obtained with an MLSE-EDC receiver depends strongly on the level of residual chromatic dispersion (after partial optical compensation) in both cases. In general, greater SPM tolerance to high channel powers is derived from the MLSE in the presence of larger residual dispersion values. An increase in the allowable channel launch power of more than 2 dB is observed for NRZ signals, whereas, the increase for duobinary may be almost 6 dB. Index TermsDuobinary, electronic dispersion compensation (EDC), optical communication, self-phase modulation (SPM).
Fig. 1. Experimental setup used to measure MLSE effectiveness with SPM impairments.

I. INTRODUCTION LECTRONIC dispersion compensation (EDC) has attracted signicant study and commercial interest in the recent past as a means to mitigate optical signal distortion in the electrical domain after detection in a photoreceiver. Types of distortion amenable to at least some degree of correction are chromatic dispersion, polarization-mode dispersion, electrical lter bandwidth limitations, and optical ltering effects [1][7]. The ability to electronically compensate for some of these impairments may allow looser component tolerances and/or system design rules, thereby promoting system cost savings and alternative network congurations. For example, EDC has been demonstrated to be effective in extending uncompensated reach length and in compensating for narrowband optical lter induced distortion [6], [7]. Such properties may be particularly valuable in metro network designs, for promoting the use of recongurable optical adddrop multiplexers, and/or allowing tighter channel spacings. The version of EDC perhaps most studied to date is maximum likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) technology. MLSE is a digital signal processing approach that operates on a sequence of bits rather than on a single bit at a time. It attempts to nd the sequence of digital data that is statistically most likely to have generated the detected optical signal. As noted, this equalization approach has already been shown to be quite effective in

mitigating the effects of several linear impairments. Recently, MLSE performance was studied in the presence of nonlinear effects where it was found that it can be effective in the presence of self-phase modulation (SPM) alone, but is largely ineffective with both SPM and strong cross-phase modulation [8]. We extend the investigation of MLSE-EDC here with a deeper look at the performance of an MLSE receiver with clearly SPM-limited signals, for both nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) and duobinary modulation formats. We experimentally measure and compare the performances of an MLSE receiver and standard receiver in experiments with different combinations of SPM nonlinearity and residual chromatic dispersion. We nd that the advantage in terms of SPM tolerance offered by the MLSE-EDC depends greatly on the level of residual dispersion. In general, MLSE provides more SPM tolerance to signals with larger uncompensated dispersion, for both modulation formats studied. Furthermore, the maximum measured allowable launch power advantage conferred by the EDC is nearly 6 dB for duobinary signals, but 2 dB for NRZ signals. II. EXPERIMENTAL CONFIGURATION The experimental setup used for all measurements is shown in Fig. 1. An optical channel at 1550 nm was modulated at 10.7 Gb/s in either the NRZ or duobinary format with a MachZehnder modulator. A pseudorandom bit sequence of was generated by a pulse pattern generator length and used to drive the modulator. The channel was amplied and launched into the rst of two ber spans with a controlled launch power. The channel was launched into the second span with the same power. The ber spans were each 107 km long and were comprised of a G.652-compliant single-mode ber with an enhanced stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS)

Manuscript received February 23, 2007; revised April 3, 2007. The authors are with Corning Incorporated, Corning, NY 14831 USA (e-mail: downiejd@corning.com). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this letter are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/LPT.2007.898768

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IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. 13, JULY 1, 2007

threshold [9]. Given the higher SBS threshold by 3 dB over standard single-mode ber, and the use of frequency dithering in the transmitting laser to further increase the SBS threshold of the NRZ signal, we ensured that signal impairments caused by high channel launch powers were due solely to SPM and not to SBS. Frequency dithering was unnecessary for the duobinary signal since it exhibits an intrinsically much higher SBS threshold than NRZ due to its lack of a carrier in its spectrum. The optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of the received signal was controlled in the experiments by varying the channel power into the ber amplier at the output of the second ber span with a variable optical attenuator (VOA). Another amplier stage including a red-pass WDM lter to eliminate excessive amplied spontaneous emission (ASE) buildup in the blue end of the -band and dispersion-compensation ber in some cases, an optical lter of bandwidth 0.6 nm, and a VOA to maintain xed received signal power followed. Clock and data were recovered in the receiver and passed to a bit-error-rate tester (BERT) for measurement of the signal bit-error rate (BER). Two different commercially available receivers were compared in the system experiments. One was a standard receiver (Rx) with a PIN photodetector, transimpedance amplier, and associated clock and data recovery circuitry. The second Rx was from the same manufacturer, but had MLSE-EDC circuitry in the back-end electronics. The MLSE Rx digital equalizer comprises a 3-bit analog-to-digital (A/D) converter operating at up ) Viterbi deto 25 Gsamples/s and a four-state (memory coder. The general equivalence of the PIN photodetectors in the two receivers allowed comparative evaluation of the effects of the MLSE-EDC technology in the second receiver. The basic experimental procedure involved varying the channel launch power into the ber spans (equal in both spans) and measuring the required signal OSNR value at the Rx to . The measurements were achieve a BER value of taken for different lengths of dispersion-compensation ber in the Rx, and with the two different receivers to understand the role that MLSE-EDC can play in extending the allowable launch power when NRZ or duobinary signals are limited by SPM. III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS We rst investigated signals modulated with the NRZ format. The total ber link length was 214 km of the G.652 ber with a nominal dispersion value at 1550 nm of 17 ps/(nm km), for a total link dispersion of about 3638 ps/nm. We varied the amount of optical dispersion compensation in the receiver to evaluate the performance of the MLSE-EDC against SPM as a function of residual chromatic dispersion. For the NRZ signal, we performed experiments with residual dispersion values of 238, 1088, and 1938 ps/nm. The results from two of these experiments are shown in Fig. 2. In general, the MLSE-EDC provides some advantage to allowable launch power level, or increased SPM tolerance. However, the degree of this advantage depends strongly on the level of residual dispersion in the signal when received. These results are in general agreement with some of the single-channel results in [8]. For moderate residual dispersion (1088 ps/nm), the SPM tolerance increase is small ( 0.5 dB), but for residual dispersion of 1938 ps/nm, the increase provided by the MLSE-EDC is signicantly greater, and allows launch

Fig. 2. OSNR required to achieve a BER value of 1 10 for an NRZ signal as a function of channel launch power. Residual dispersion values are (a) 1088 and (b) 1938 ps/nm.

Fig. 3. Optical eye diagrams for NRZ signal with 1938-ps/nm dispersion and launch powers of (a) 12 and (b) 16 dBm. Y-axis: intensity (a.u.).

powers up to 17 dBm. The MLSE afforded negligible or negative advantage for very small dispersion levels due to the minor back-to-back penalty exhibited by the MLSE Rx, possibly due to the limited resolution of the A/D converter [6]. Optical eye diagrams of the received NRZ signal with uncompensated dispersion of 1938 ps/nm are shown in Fig. 3 for two launch power levels. At 12 dBm, the eye is open due to the interaction between SPM and dispersion. At 16 dBm, the eye is essentially closed by the greater SPM nonlinear impairment but can be still well-corrected by the MLSE-EDC Rx. The OSNR was 30 dB for both eye diagram gures. We found similar trends in the results for a duobinary signal. Measurements were taken for residual dispersion values of 1088, 1938, 2788, and 3638 ps/nm. The range of residual dispersion studied is about twice that for NRZ because of duobinarys inherently greater dispersion tolerance. Results for the three largest of these dispersion values are shown in Fig. 4.

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Fig. 5. Allowable launch power advantage using MLSE-EDC Rx.

residual dispersion value. This involved extrapolating our measured data back to lower power levels in some cases. IV. SUMMARY We have performed a systematic study of the effectiveness of MLSE-EDC for increasing the SPM tolerance for NRZ and duobinary signals at 10.7 Gb/s. We found for both formats that the SPM advantage from MLSE is highly dependent on the amount of uncompensated dispersion at the end of a 214-km ber link. In general, greater SPM tolerance advantages were obtained from the MLSE technology for larger values of residual dispersion. The biggest increase of nearly 6 dB obtained with the MLSE Rx was found for a completely uncompensated duobinary signal. REFERENCES
[1] G. S. Kanter, A. K. Samal, and A. Gandhi, Electronic dispersion compensation for extended reach, in Proc. Optical Fiber Communication Conf. (OFC 2004), Washington, DC, Paper TuG1. [2] T. Nielsen and S. Chandrasekhar, OFC 2004 workshop on optical and electronic mitigation of impairments, J. Lightw. Technol., vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 131142, Jan. 2005. [3] H. Griesser, J.-P. Elbers, C. Fuerst, H. Wernz, and C. Glingener, Increasing the dispersion tolerance of 10 Gb/s duobinary modulation by electrical distortion equalisation, in Proc. Eur. Conf. Optical Communications (ECOC 2004), Stockholm, Sweden, 2004, Paper We4.P.106. [4] M. D. Feuer, S.-Y. Huang, S. L. Woodward, O. Coskun, and M. Boroditsky, Electronic dispersion compensation for a 10-Gb/s link using a directly modulated laser, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 15, no. 12, pp. 17881790, Dec. 2003. [5] H. Haunstein and R. Urbansky, Application of electronic equalization and error correction in lightwave systems, in Proc. Eur. Conf. Optical Communications (ECOC 2004), Stockholm, Sweden, 2004, Paper Th.1.5.1. [6] J. D. Downie, M. Sauer, and J. Hurley, Experimental measurements of uncompensated reach increase from MLSE-EDC with regard to measurement BER and modulation format, Opt. Express, vol. 14, pp. 1152011527, 2006. [7] M. Rubsamen, P. J. Winzer, and R.-J. Essiambre, MLSE receivers for narrowband optical ltering, in Proc. Optical Fiber Communication Conf. (OFC 2006), Washington, DC, Paper OWB6. [8] S. Chandrasekhar and A. H. Gnauck, Performance of MLSE receiver in a dispersion-managed multispan experiment at 10.7 Gb/s under nonlinear transmission, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 18, no. 23, pp. 24482450, Dec. 1, 2006. [9] A. Kobyakov, S. Kumar, D. Q. Chowdhury, A. B. Rufn, M. Sauer, S. R. Bickham, and R. Mishra, Design concept for optical bers with enhanced SBS threshold, Opt. Express, vol. 13, pp. 53385346, 2005.

Fig. 4. OSNR required to achieve a BER value of 1 10 for a duobinary signal as a function of channel launch power. Residual dispersion values are (a) 1938, (b) 2788, and (c) 3638 ps/nm.

As with NRZ, the SPM tolerance for the duobinary signal obtained from MLSE-EDC increases with residual dispersion, but is also generally larger for duobinary. However, the maximum launch power decreased with increasing dispersion for the duobinary signal for these larger residual dispersion values. The results for both formats are summarized in Fig. 5, expressed as the difference between maximum allowed channel powers using the MLSE-EDC Rx and the standard Rx. The maximum channel power is dened at the 2-dB penalty point comfor the stanpared to the required OSNR for BER dard Rx in the linear regime ( 0-dBm launch power), for each