This thesis investigates the performance limits of phase modulated and direct detected WDM systems at 55.5 and 111 Gb/s with 50 GHz channel spacing. Particularly, we are interested in identifying the parameters of the optical link that maximize the performance of a certain transmission format and subsequently analyze different modulation schemes and link configurations at their optimum operation points. For this purpose, a novel optimization algorithm is proposed and extensively used for determining the optimum parameters of the investigated scenarios.
Firstly, different "flavors'' of DQPSK at 55.5 Gb/s are compared, such as return and non-return-to-zero pulse shapes using single and dual-carrier implementations. Secondly, we introduce optical DQPSK transmission using Nyquist pulses as a way of minimizing the spectral occupancy of the signals. And finally, the transmission of 111 Gb/s encoding 3 bits per transmitted symbol is investigated.
Oscar Gaete