New Techniques for the Suppression of the Four Wave Mixing-Induced Distortion in Non-Zero Dispersion Fiber WDM Systems

I. Neokosmidis, T. Kamalakis, A. Chipouras and T. Sphicopoulos

Department of Informatics and Telecommunications, University of Athens Panepistimiopolis Ilissia, Athens, Greece, GR-15784 i.neokosmidis@di.uoa.gr

Abstract: The performance of a Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) optical network can be severely degraded due to fiber nonlinear effects. In the case where Non-Zero Dispersion (NZD) fibers are employed, the Four Wave Mixing (FWM) effect sets an upper limit on the input power especially in the case of narrow channel spacing. In order to reduce FWM-induced distortion two new techniques, the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation and the use of pre-chirped pulses, are investigated. It is shown that both techniques can greatly improve the Q factor in a 10Gb/s WDM system. This happens even for very high input powers (~10dBm) where the degradation of the conventional WDM system is prohibitively strong. The proposed methods are also applied and tested in higher bit rates (40Gbps). It is deduced that although the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation technique marginally improves the system performance, the optical pre-chirp technique can still be used to greatly increase the maximum allowable input power of the system. Index Terms: Chirp, nonlinear optics, optical crosstalk, optical fiber

communications, wavelength division multiplexing.

I. INTRODUCTION Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) is widely being adopted as a means to increase the capacity of optical networks. However, the rapid growth in the number of Internet users and the need for provision of new broadband services is expected to significantly increase the traffic volume. There is thus a tendency to develop larger WDM networks with narrower channel spacing and higher channel capacity. Furthermore, a significant decrease of the overall cost can be accomplished by reducing the number of optical amplifiers used in the links which leading to the use of higher input power at the transmitter. However, this increase in the optical power results to signal degradation due to fiber nonlinear effects, including Four Wave Mixing (FWM), Cross Phase Modulation (XPM) and Self Phase Modulation (SPM). Both XPM and FWM introduce intensity fluctuations that are dependent on the neighboring channels, resulting into interchannel interference throughout the fiber length. SPM is generally considered negligible compared to XPM, since even for a system of two optical channels XPM is twice as effective as SPM for the same intensity [1, p. 262]. However, in WDM systems employing Non-zero Dispersion (NZD) fibers the main nonlinear induced penalty arises from FWM. This is especially true in systems with dispersion compensation in which the XPM induced distortion is diminished [2]-[3]. In recent years, several FWM suppression techniques have been proposed. Since the power of the FWM products decreases quickly as the fiber dispersion increases, one solution is to use standard single mode fibers. This however, results in a large dispersion accumulation at the receiver and necessitates the use of long dispersion compensating fibers in each network node. Another approach is to use

optical multiplexers and demultiplexers with the combination of delay lines [4], bitphase arranged RZ (BARZ) signals [5], hybrid WDM/TDM technique [6], polarization-division multiplexing [7] and unequal channel spacing [8]-[10]. The above techniques come at the expense of less channel efficiency or / and more network complexity. For example, the use of unequal channel spacing requires the design of optical multiplexers and demultiplexers with central wavelengths not compatible with the ITU grid. In this paper, two new methods based on a hybrid ASK/FSK modulation and pulse pre-chirping are proposed for the suppression of the FWM effect. The basic ideas behind these methods are summarized as follows. FWM is a nonlinear process in which three waves of frequencies fi, fj and fk (ki, j) interact through the third-order electric susceptibility of the optical fiber to generate a product wave at frequency fijk=fi+fj-fk. In a WDM system, a product is generated for every possible combination of channels. Therefore, even if the system has only ten channels, hundreds of new components are generated. If the channels are assumed to be in-phase and equally spaced then the efficiency of the FWM process is high and most of the generated components will be located at the channel frequencies. By FSK modulating the WDM channels, the spectral position of the FWM components is altered and hence less products fall near the central frequency of the WDM channels. Hence the accumulation of the FWM noise is reduced. On the other hand the optical pre-chirping increases the phase mismatch by randomizing the phases of the input signals. Since the efficiency of the FWM process is inversely proportional to the phase mismatch it follows that optical pre-chirping can suppress the FWM noise. The effectiveness of the new methods is studied by numerically solving the basic nonlinear propagation equation with the Split Step Fourier Method (SSFM) [1].

Simulations show that both techniques can provide a significant improvement on the Q factor obtained at the receiver. The maximum allowable input power is significantly increased and a power gain that can be as high as 3dB may be obtained for 10Gb/s WDM systems. The effectiveness of the two techniques is also tested for higher transmission rates. It is shown that the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation can only marginally improve the performance of a 40Gb/s WDM system. Optical pre-chirping on the other hand, offers a significant improvement even for these high bit rates. The paper is organized as follows: The system configuration is shown in section II. The transmission model used to study the system under consideration is described in section III. In section IV, the importance of the FWM-induced distortion in a conventional WDM system is discussed. The basic concepts of the proposed compensation techniques are illustrated in section V. The results obtained by the application of the two methods are presented and discussed in section VI. Some concluding remarks are given in section VII.

II. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION A conventional WDM link is shown in figure 1. The WDM channel are ASK modulated and multiplexed in a single WDM signal. The WDM signal is then launched into a Non-Zero Dispersion Fiber. As the signal propagates through the fiber, nonlinear effects can cause interchannel interference and degrade its quality. At the receiver the signals are dispersion compensated and demultiplexed. Each signal is then detected using a direct detection receiver. The receiver may consist of a photodiode, an electrical amplifier and an electrical filter. After the filter the signal is sampled and a decision threshold device is used to detect whether a 1 or a 0 is received.

In this paper, the input optical power waveform representing a single 1-bit, p1(t) is specified within the time interval [0, (1+b)Tp] as [11]: T T t (1 + b) p p , t { 0, b Tp and Tp , (1 + b)Tp } Pin 1 sin b Tp 2 2 p1 (t ) = (1) t b Tp , Tp Pin ,

where Pin denotes the peak input power, Tp represents the bit duration and b specifies the pulse shape. Varying b from 1 to 0, the pulse changes from cos2(t)-like to rectangular. To estimate the performance of the system, the input channels will be assumed modulated by a 28-1 pseudorandom bit streams of the above shape. Throughout this work NRZ pulses are used with a value of b=0.4. Finally, the bit duration Tp was taken to be 100ps for bit rate R=10Gbps and Tp=25ps for R=40Gbps. The central channel of the WDM system is assumed to be located around 0=1.55m. The NZD transmission fiber is assumed to have a chromatic dispersion coefficient D=2ps/nm/km, an optical loss coefficient adB=0.2dB/Km and a nonlinear coefficient =2(Watt x km)-1. The Dispersion Compensating Fiber (DCF) used at the receiver has D=-200ps/nm/km, adB=0.5dB/km and =4.5(Watt x km)-1. The total length of the optical link is L=160Km. At its ith output port, the WDM demultiplexer is assumed to have a Gaussian transfer function,
Hi ( f ) = e

( f f i )2
2 f c2

(2)

where
fc = B 2 ln(10)

(3)

In the above equations, B is the 40dB bandwidth of the demultiplexer and fi is the central frequency of each channel. The Gaussian transfer function is often encountered in many practical demultiplexers (i.e. Arrayed Waveguide Gratings [12]).

III. THE TRANSMISSION MODEL In order to test the performance of the system, the fibers propagation equation can be numerically solved using the Split Step Fourier Method (SSFM) [1, pp. 51-53]. The basic propagation equation is written as: A j 2 A 2 = 2 2 A + j A A z 2 t 2 (4)

where A=A(t,z) is the slowly varying complex envelope of the optical field at time t and position z along the fiber, 2 is the Group Velocity Dispersion (GVD) parameter, =adB/4.343 is the fiber loss coefficient and is the nonlinear coefficient of the fiber. In a WDM system consisting of N channels, the input signal (z=0) can be written as:

A(t ,0) = Ai (t ,0)e j 2f i t

i =1

(5)

where Ai(t,0) and fi are the slowly varying envelope and the central frequency of the i-th channel respectively. Equation (4) under the initial condition (5) can be used to describe the signal propagation taking into account the optical losses, chromatic dispersion and the three Kerr-induced nonlinear phenomena namely the SPM, XPM and FWM effects. All channels are assumed aligned in time at the input (synchronous WDM system) and equally spaced. Under these conditions the strength of FWM effect is maximized. In order to investigate the performance of a WDM system, the Q factor can be calculated from the eye diagrams at the receiver. The Q factor is a commonly used parameter in telecommunications and it is expressed as: Q= P 1 P o 1 + o (6)

where <P1> and <Po> are the average optical power of bits 1 and 0 respectively and 1 and o are the corresponding standard deviations of the noise.

IV. IMPORTANCE OF THE FWM INDUCED DISTORTION

As WDM channels become denser, the power limitations imposed by nonlinear effects, become more pronounced. FWM introduces intensity fluctuations in a WDM channel due to the existence of the other channels. The power of these fluctuations increases with decreasing channel spacing and causes interchannel interference at the receiver. Before discussing the FWM compensation techniques, it will be useful to compare the FWM contribution to system degradation with that induced by XPM and SPM effects. In order to accomplish this comparison, the effect of SPM and XPM can be isolated from the effect of FWM by numerically solving the set of coupled propagation equations (7) 2 Ai A j 2 A a 2 + 1i i + 2i 2 i + Ai = j Ai + 2 Al Ai z t 2 t 2 l i (7)

instead of equation (4), where 1 i N and Ai=Ai(t,z) is the envelope of the i channel as above. Also 1i is the inverse of the group velocity at the frequency fi and 2i is the GVD parameter at the same frequency. Note that in the above system of equations the SPM effect is described by the j|Ai|2 on the right hand side of (7) while the XPM effect is described by the sum 2jAili|Al|2. Since the FWM is not taken into account in (7), a comparison between the solutions of (4) and (7) can be used to estimate the importance of the FWM-induced distortion in the WDM link. In order to ascertain that the FWM is indeed the dominant noise source, the eye diagrams of the central channel are plotted in figure 2, in the case where a) Only

SPM is assumed (i.e. only the central WDM channel is on), b) only SPM and XPM are assumed, c) FWM, XPM and SPM are assumed. An 8 channel 10Gb/s WDM system is assumed with a channel spacing of 50GHz. As seen by the eye diagrams of figure 2, the degradation induced by SPM and XPM is much lower than that of FWM and hence, in a WDM link with NZDF, the FWM imposes the severest limitations. The results of figure 2 can also be justified theoretically. In [13], it is shown that the XPM intensity fluctuations depend on the accumulated dispersion of the span. When dispersion compensation is used, the XPM-induced intensity distortion is greatly diminished. On the other hand the FWM-induced intensity distortion rests almost unaffected from dispersion compensation. Also as shown in [13] the FWMinduced intensity distortion decreases as 1/2 and as 1/|2|, while the XPM distortion decreases much slower. It is therefore not surprising that in the dense WDM system considered, the FWM-induced intensity distortion dominates over the XPM effect.

V. DESCRIPTION OF THE FWM COMPENSATION SCHEMES A. Hybrid FSK/ASK Modulation Technique

In order to explain the effectiveness of the hybrid ASK/FSK technique, we first consider 3 CW waves at frequencies f1, f2 and f3. The FWM products, will be located at frequencies fpqr=fp+fq-fr, where p,q,r take the values 1,2 or 3.As mentioned in the introduction, if the channels are equally spaced, the central frequency of the products will coincide with some of the central frequencies of the channels. In order to reduce the number of FWM products that coincide with the WDM channels, one solution is to modulate the WDM signals using a special kind of FSK modulation. In the context of this special scheme, the WDM channels are divided into pairs and on each pair the channels follow the same FSK modulation. The FSK modulation of two

adjacent pairs is opposite, i.e. if the channels in a pair are detuned + away from their central frequency, the channels of the adjacent pair are inversely detuned and so on as shown in figure 3. Note that a similar (but constant) channel detuning scheme is also used in the unequal channel spacing technique [10]. The hybrid ASK/FSK system structure is depicted in figure 4a. Figure 4b, depicts the optical spectrum of a hybrid ASK/FSK signal with a 10Gb/s ASK rate and a 1Gb/s FSK rate. The peak optical power of the ASK signal is Pin=10dBm and a =5GHz detuning. The modulation of the FSK signal is 1,0,1,0, ,0,1. From figure 4b one can notice the two peaks caused by the FSK modulation.

B. Optical Pre-chirp

In this section optical pre-chirping is proposed as another solution for the reduction of the effect of the FWM induced distortion. Since the efficiency of the FWM products are inversely proportional to the phase mismatch, it follows that reducing the phase coherence may reduce the power of the FWM noise. One way to reduce this coherence is through pulse pre-chirping. Note that a similar technique is used in the suppression of the XPM induced distortion in systems employing standard fibers [14]-[15]. In the case of NZD fibers, where the FWM effect dominates as discussed in section IV, optical pre-chirping will be shown to greatly improve the Q factor by suppressing the FWM effect. There are several methods to produce a pre-chirped signal such as cascading intensity and phase modulators or using dispersion-compensating devices like chirped fiber gratings and DCFs. In this work, the latter technique was chosen due to its ease of implementation. The optimal length of the DCF fiber used at the transmitter, in order to pre-chirp the optical pulses was evaluated through iterative simulations that

aimed to maximize the performance of the system. The system configuration is shown in figure 5. Note a DCF is also used at the receiver in order to compensate the remaining accumulated dispersion of the signal. In this configuration, Pin designates the power at the end of the transmitter DCF.

VI. EFFECTIVENESS OF THE PROPOSED METHODS

In order to investigate the performance improvement of the two techniques, a series of simulations were performed using the SSFM method. The 40dB bandwidth B of the optical demultiplexer was optimized at the receiver in order to achieve the highest Q factor value for the different values of the input power Pin. In figure 6, the eye diagrams for the 5th channel (central channel) of a single span eight-channel WDM system in the case when a) none of the two methods is applied (conventional WDM system), b) the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation is applied and c) when the pre-chirped pulses are used. A 10Gb/s WDM system is assumed with channel spacing equal to 50GHz. The channel detuning of the hybrid ASK/FSK system is =5GHz and the FSK modulation rate is 1Gb/s. A 225m DCF fiber was used for optical pre-chirping, with parameters as given in section II. This figure provides a first indication of the performance improvement of the two techniques. As shown in the figure, the eye-diagram of the uncompensated system is closed due to the effect of the FWM induced distortion. The Q factor in this case is 3.4 resulting in a high error probability. If the FWM is assumed to follow Gaussian distribution, this Q factor corresponds to an error probability of erfc(Q/ 2 )/23x10-4. However, adopting the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation technique, the quality of the link is significantly improved as shown by the second eye-diagram. The Q factor in this case is 7.5, implying an error probability of the order 10-14. The results are even better for

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the case of optical pre-chirping in which case the Q factor is 10.8 and the corresponding error probability is even lower. Hence, the effectiveness of the proposed methods on reducing the FWM noise is clearly seen even for input powers as high as ~10dBm where the degradation of the conventional WDM system is prohibitively high. To further illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods and gain a more quantitative aspect at the performance of each compensation scheme, the Q factor was evaluated for various values of the input power. Figure 7 depicts the Q factor of the central channel (worst case) as a function of the input power Pin assuming a 10Gb/s WDM system with a) N=8 channels and a channel spacing fch=50GHz, b) N=8 channels and a fch=100GHz, c) N=16 channels and fch=50GHz and d) N=16 channels and a fch=100GHz spacing. The FSK modulation rate for the hybrid ASK/FSK is 1Gb/s and a =5GHz frequency detuning is used. The DCF fiber used in the above cases is 225m, 150m, 48.5m and 19.4m for figures 7(a), 7(b), 7(c) and 7(d) respectively. As shown by the figures, both techniques greatly improve the Q factor in all cases. For example, in the case of a N=16 WDM channel system with 100GHz channel spacing (figure 7d), the obtained Q factor for Pin=14dBm was approximately 5.3 for the uncompensated system and 8.8 for the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation at the transmitter. These values correspond to a Q factor improvement of 2.2dB. It can also be seen that while a Q factor Q=10 is achieved for Pin=12.3dBm for the conventional system, the same Q factor value is achieved for Pin=13.8dBm in the case of the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation technique. This corresponds to a power gain of 1.5dB. The results obtained from the optical pre-chirping technique are even better. In this case the Q factor is Q=15.1 for Pin=14dBm. It is understood that the improvement of the Q factor is 4.55dB. In order to obtain Q factor equal to 10 the input power can

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be as high as 15dBm, and this translates to a power gain greater than 2.5dB. Note that this power gain of 2.5dB can be used to increase the tolerance of the system or increase the span length by 2.5/0.2=12.5Km. Similar results can also be observed for the other cases considered in the figure. It is therefore evident that both techniques offer a significant improvement in the performance of the system. In all cases the Q factor is reduced as the input power increases. This is not surprising, since it is well known that the power of the produced components is proportional to Pin3. Hence, these results demonstrate again the strong dependence of the FWM noise and consequently of the Q factor on the input power. However, the improvement of the proposed techniques is significant even for high input powers. In figure 8, the performance improvement of the two techniques in the case of a 8 channel 40Gb/s WDM system is investigated. The channels are assumed to have 200GHz spacing while the rest of the parameters are the same as those of the 10Gb/s WDM system considered earlier. The FSK modulation rate for the hybrid ASK/FSK is 1Gb/s and a =5GHz frequency detuning is used. The DCF fiber used in the above case is 193.9m. The hybrid ASK/FSK modulation technique only marginally improves the system performance. On the other hand the use of optical pre-chirped pulses significantly improves the value of the Q factor. For Pin=14dBm the Q factors of the conventional and the prechirped system is approximately equal to 8.0 and 16.0 implying a 3dB improvement. Also a power gain as high as 2.5dB is obtained for Q=12. It seems therefore that pre-chirping the optical channels can be used in order to reduce the FWM-induced distortion for a 40Gb/s WDM system as well. Although 40Gb/s WDM systems are presently not used in commercial networks, they may constitute an option for future all-optical backbone networks. It should also be noticed

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that the optical pre-chirping can be implemented with greater ease than the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation technique. A single DCF at the receiver can be used to simultaneously pre-chirp all the WDM signals. On the other hand, the hybrid ASK/FSK technique may prove more amenable for integration with the WDM multiplexer on a single chip. In addition, both methods seem to present significant advantages compared to other suppression techniques since they overcome some problems. For example, the use of unequally channel spacing [8]-[10] comes at the expense of increased multiplexer / demultiplexer design complexity. In [10] the BER is improved by one order of magnitude while, as shown in this section, the proposed techniques achieve many orders of magnitude improvement. Unlike the hybrid TDM/WDM technique [6], these methods do not require the allocation of time slots and the generation of RZ pulses. The optical delay line technique [4] is applicable only when zero dispersion fibers are used. It is also interesting to note that the methods proposed in this paper employ NRZ modulation which is more easily implemented than the RZ modulation.

VII. CONCLUSIONS

In this paper, two techniques, hybrid ASK/FSK modulation and pre-chirping the optical pulses, are applied to suppress the FWM-induced distortion which can pose important limitation on the input power of a WDM system. The effectiveness of the two methods is numerically demonstrated using the Split Step Fourier Method (SSFM) to simulate the WDM signal propagation. From the obtained results, it is shown that both techniques greatly improve the performance of the system, providing a power gain that can be as high as 2.5dB in the case of a 10Gbps WDM system. Prechirping the optical pulses can also be used for the reduction of the FWM-induced

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distortion for a higher bit rate (40Gb/s) system as well and seems to be more easily implemented than the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation technique.

REFERENCES

[1] G. P. Agrawal, Nonlinear Fiber Optics, 2nd ed. New York: Academic, 1995. [2] A. V. T. Cartaxo, Cross-Phase Modulation in Intensity Modulation- Direct Detection WDM Systems with Multiple Optical Amplifiers and Dispersion Compensators, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 17, No. 2, pp. 178-190, February 1999. [3] R. Hui, K. R. Demarest and C. T. Allen, Cross-Phase Modulation in Multispan WDM Optical Fiber Systems, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 17, No. 6, pp. 1018-1026, June 1999. [4] K. Inoue, Suppression Technique for Fiber Four-Wave Mixing Using Optical Multi-/Demultiplexers and a Delay Line, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 455-461, March 1993. [5] K. Sekine, N. Kikuchi, S. Sasaki and H. Ikeda, FWM crosstalk reduction using bit-phase arranged RZ (BARZ) signals in WDM systems, in Proc. Optoelectronics and Communications Conf. (OECC) 96, 1996, pp. 114-115, paper 17B2-4. [6] A. Okada, V. Curri, S. M. Gemelos and L. G. Kazovsky, Reduction of FourWave Mixing crosstalk using a novel hybrid WDM/TDM technique, ECOC98, 1998, pp. 289-290. [7] K. Sekine, S. Sasaki and N. Kikuchi, 10Gbit/s four-channel wavelength- and polarization-division multiplexing transmission over 340km with 0.5nm channel spacing, Electron. Lett., vol. 31, pp. 49-50, 1995.

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[8] F. Forghieri, R. Tkach, A. Chraplyvy and D. Marcuse, Reduction of four-wave mixing crosstalk in WDM systems using unequally spaced channels, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 6, pp. 754-756, 1994. [9] H. Suzuki, S. Ohteru and N. Takachio, 22 x 10 Gb/s WDM transmission based on extended method of unequally channel allocation around the zero-dispersion wavelength region, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., vol. 11, pp. 1677-1679, 1999. [10] A. Boskovic, S. Ten and V. L. da Silva, FWM penalty reduction in dense WDM systems through channel detuning, ECOC98, 1998, pp. 163-164. [11] P. J. Winzer, M. Pfennigbauer, M. M. Strasser and W. R. Leeb, Optimum Filter Bandwidths for Optically Preamplified NRZ Recievers, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 19, No. 9, pp. 1263-1273, September 2001. [12] M. K. Smit and C. Dam, PHASAR-Based WDM-Devices: Principles and Applications, IEEE J. Selected Topics in Quant. Elec. Vol. 2, No. 2, June 1996, pp. 236-250. [13] B. Xu and M. Brandt-Pearce, Comparison of FWM- and XPM-Induced Crosstalk Using the Volterra Series Transfer Function Method, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 40-53, January 2003. [14] A.Sano, Y. Miyamoto, S. kuwahara and H. Toba, A 40Gb/s/ch WDM transmission with SPM/XPM suppression through prechirping and dispersion management, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 18, pp. 1519-1527, 2000. [15] A. Sano and Y. Miyamoto, Performance evaluation of prechirped RZ and CSRZ formats in high-speed transmission systems with dispersion management, J. Lightwave Technol., vol. 19, No. 12, pp. 1864-1871, December 2001.

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Figure 1

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Figure 2

17

Figure 3

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(a)

Figure 4

19

Figure 5

20

Figure 6

21

44 40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0 5 6 7

Uncompensated system With FSK With pre-chirp 5th channel

Q factor

Pin(dBm)

10
(a)

40 36 32 28
Uncompensated system With FSK With pre-chirp 5th channel

Q factor

24 20 16 12 8 4 10 11 12 13 14 15
(b)

Pin(dBm)

40 36 32 28
Uncompensated system With FSK With pre-chirp 8th channel

Q factor

24 20 16 12 8 4 4 5 6 7 8 9
(c)

Pin(dBm)

22

40 36 32 28
Uncompensated system With FSK With pre-chirp 8th channel

Q factor

24 20 16 12 8 4 10 11 12 13 14 15
(d)

Pin(dBm)

Figure 7

23

36 32 28
Uncompensated system With FSK With pre-chirp 5th channel

Q factor

24 20 16 12 8 4 10 11 12 13 14 15

Pin(dBm)

Figure 8

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Figure Captions

Fig. 1: System structure.

Fig. 2: Comparison of the SPM, XPM and FWM effect when Pin=10dBm. a) SPM

effect, b) SPM and XPM effects, c) SPM, XPM and FWM effects

Fig. 3: The FSK modulation scheme used in the proposed system

Fig. 4: a) the hybrid ASK/FSK WDM system configuration and b) the power spectral

density of a hybrid ASK/FSK modulated signal for Pin=10dBm. The ASK and FSK modulation rates are 10Gb/s and 1Gb/s respectively and the channel detuning is =5GHz.

Fig. 5: System configuration of the pre-chirped optical WDM system.

Fig. 6: Eye diagrams for the central channel of a single span eight-channel WDM

system: a) conventional WDM system, b) application of the hybrid ASK/FSK modulation and c) WDM with pre-chirped pulses. The transmission rate is 10Gb/s, the channel spacing is 50GHz and the input power is 10dBm.

Fig. 7: Q factor of the central channel as a function of the input power Pin for a

10Gbps system of a) 8 channels and 50GHz channel spacing, b) 8 channels and 100GHz channel spacing, c) 16 channels and 50GHz channel spacing and d) 16 channels and 100GHz channel spacing

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Fig. 8: Q factor vs. input power for a single span eight-channel 40Gbps system

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