Performance analysis of 20Gb/s RZ-DPSK non-slope matched transoceanic submarine links

Brendan Slater,Sonia Boscolo,Ronald Freund,Sergei K Turitsyn,Lutz Molle,Joerg Schwartz,Terence Broderick,Stuart Barnes,Cristoph Caspar

doi:10.1364/oe.15.010999

Abstract

Direct computation of the bit-error rate (BER) and laboratory experiments are used to assess the performance of a non-slope matched transoceanic submarine transmission link operating at 20Gb/s channel rate and employing return-to-zero differential-phase shift keying (RZ-DPSK) signal modulation. Using this system as an example, we compare the accuracies of the existing theoretical approaches to the BER estimation for the RZ-DPSK format.

Highlights

New submarine fiber transmission solutions are required to meet transoceanic traffic needs over the few years
Direct computation of the bit-error rate (BER) and laboratory experiments are used to assess the performance of a non-slope matched transoceanic submarine transmission link operating at 20 Gb/s channel rate and employing return-to-zero differential-phase shift keying (RZ-differential phase-shift keying (DPSK)) signal modulation
With existing optical fiber undersea networks being mostly operated at 10 Gb/s channel rate using conventional optical signal amplitude-shift keying (ASK) modulation, an obvious question that emerges in the study of their upgrades is the potential for deploying higher bit rates in conjunction with advanced modulation formats

Summary

Introduction

New submarine fiber transmission solutions are required to meet transoceanic traffic needs over the few years. The application of DPSK to legacy undersea systems using the conventional non-slope matched dispersion-shifted fibers has already been demonstrated at both 10 Gb/s [4] and 40 Gb/s [5, 6] channel rates. Note that a variety of new transmission regimes similar to that in high-bit-rate systems can be applied even in existing systems operating at lower bit rate As it was pointed out in [9], a pseudo-linear, bit-overlapping transmission regime that is typically attributed to 40 Gb/s systems can be advantageously applied at 10 Gb/s rates using short carrier pulses and RZ-DPSK format. The major goal of this paper is to assess the performance of a typical non-slope matched transoceanic submarine transmission link using 20 Gb/s channel rate and RZ-DPSK modulation with different duty cycles.

System description and numerical modeling x 9 x 13

Numerical and experimental results

Findings

Conclusion