Experimental investigation of 84-Gb/s and 112-Gb/s polarization-switched quadrature phase-shift keying signals.

We experimentally investigate 28-GBd (84-Gb/s) and 37.3-GBd (112-Gb/s) polarization-switched quadrature phase-shift keying (PS-QPSK) signals. In single-channel transmission experiments over up to 12500 km ultra large effective area fiber, we compare their performance to that of polarization-division multiplexing quadrature phase-shift keying (PDM-QPSK) signals at the same bit rates. The experimental results show that PS-QPSK not only benefits from its better sensitivity but also offers an increased tolerance to intra-channel nonlinearities.

Modeling nonlinear phase noise in differentially phase-modulated optical communication systems.

Using an alternative approach for evaluating the Bit-Error Rate (BER), we present a numerical and experimental investigation of the performance of phase-modulated optical communication systems in the presence of nonlinear phase noise and dispersion. The numerical method is based on the well known Karhunen-Lo;eve expansion combined with a linearization technique of the Nonlinear Schr odinger Equation (NLSE) to account for the nonlinear interaction between signal and noise. Our numerical results show a good agreement with experiments.