Experimental demonstration of filter parameters’ effect on the performance of all-optical thresholding

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate and experimentally demonstrate the filter parameters’ effect on the performance of the typical all-optical thresholding (AOT) system. By establishing a conceptual scheme, the AOT’s output power, waveform, power transform function, as well as the bit-error-rate performance are measured and analyzed with different filter parameters including center wavelength and passband width, while available researches mainly focus on employing various fibers. We typically select the center wavelength of 1567, 1576, 1585, 1594, 1603 nm, and each center wavelength corresponds to the passband width of 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18 nm, respectively. And when we fix the signal power injected into the highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) to 18.5 dBm, an optimal system performance with power improvement of 4 dB can be achieved for a center wavelength of 1576 nm and a corresponding passband width of 18 nm. This result provides a new perspective for future studies on thresholding performance optimization.