Characterisation of a parallel optical all pass filter for chromatic dispersion equalisation in 10 Gb/s system

Abstract

The chromatic dispersion (CD) that occurs in single mode fibres (SMFs) is an important issue that needs to be addressed in long-haul optical communication links. The effect of CD is pulse spreading which in turn leads to inter-symbol interference, thus resulting in the deterioration of the bit error rate (BER) performance of the system. An alternative CD compensation technique that utilises a parallel optical all pass filter (p-OAPF) is presented, where the p-OAPF design is based on the inverse phase response of the SMF. The p-OAPF is based on a class of all-pass filter. Simulation results of the proposed technique show an increase in the repeater-less length of a point-to-point optical communication system by up to three and four times using a non-return-to-zero data format with a rectangular and Gaussian pulse shape, respectively, at error-free condition (BER < 10 -9 ). The results also show that the p-OAPF is robust in performing dispersion equalisation at a wide range of SMF lengths to attain error-free communication.