Timing jitter and its impact on a self‐synchronised optical fibre PPM system

Abstract

AbstractAn original spectral characterisation for the jitter in optical fibre pulse position modulation (PPM) is developed. The characterisation is used to examine the problem of slot synchronisation in PPM under two distinct cases. First when the PPM system is dominated by the self modulation noise namely the pattern‐dependent jitter. Then when both pattern and receiver‐generated jitter accumulate to impair the PPM system. We present a thorough performance analysis of the system under jitter impairment. Original results are obtained for the slot timing variance and the wrong slot error probability (WSE) in terms of the PPM number of slots, the phase lock loop (PLL) bandwidth and the normalised fibre bandwidth. The results indicate that with proper selection of the system parameters the slot jitter impairment can be minimised and maintained within prespecified levels. Frame synchronisation robustness is examined for a novel class of frame synchronisers previously proposed. Original results are presented for the extracted frame clock timing variance and the system WSE probability due to frame clock jitter when the system is dominated by its self noise. The frame synchronisers performance is shown to be optimisable through proper selection of the PLL bandwidth and the number of natural sequences tracked.