keying (CPFSK), as the delay interferometer is equivalent to a delay-and-multiply
demodulator. A receiver for M-ary DPSK, M > 2, can similarly be constructed as shown in
Fig. 2(b). Its output photocurrents are:
() () ( )
sssiDPSK
TtEtERtI −=
*
2
1
,
Re , and
() () ( )
sssqDPSK
TtEtERtI −=
*
2
1
,
Im .
A key motivation for employing differentially coherent detection is that binary DPSK has
2.8 dB higher sensitivity than noncoherent OOK at a BER of 10
−9
[5]. However, the constraint
that signal points can only differ in phase allows only one DOF per polarization per carrier,
the same as noncoherent detection. As the photocurrents in Eq. (1) to (3) are not linear
functions of the E-field, linear impairments, such as CD and PMD, also cannot be
compensated fully in the electrical domain after photodetection.
A more advanced detector for M-ary DPSK is the multichip DPSK receiver, which has
multiple DPSK receivers arranged in parallel, each with a different interferometer delay that is
an integer multiple of T
s
[14,15]. Since a multichip receiver compares the phase of the current
symbol to a multiplicity of previous symbols, the extra information available to the detector
enables higher sensitivity. In the limit that the number of parallel DPSK receivers is infinite,
the performance of multi-chip DPSK approaches coherent PSK [15]. In practice, the number
of parallel DPSK receivers required for good performance needs to be equal to the impulse
duration of the channel divided by T
s
. Although multi-chip DPSK does not require a local
oscillator (LO) laser, carrier synchronization and polarization control, the hardware
complexity can be a significant disadvantage.
3.3 Hybrid of noncoherent and differentially coherent detection
A hybrid of noncoherent and differentially coherent detection can be used to recover
information from both amplitude and differential phase. One such format is polarization-shift
keying (PolSK), which encodes information in the Stokes parameter. If we let
() ()
()
tj
xx
x
etatE
φ
= and
() ()
()
tj
yy
y
etatE
φ
= be the E-fields in the two polarizations, the
Stokes parameters are
22
1 yx
aaS −= ,
()
δ
cos2
2 yx
aaS = and
()
δ
sin2
3 yx
aaS = , where
() () ()
ttt
yx
φφδ
−= [16]. A PolSK receiver is shown in Fig. 3. The phase noise tolerance of
PolSK is evident by examining S
1
to S
3
. Firstly, S
1
is independent of phase. Secondly, S
2
and
S
3
depend on the phase difference
() ()
tt
yx
φφ
− . As
()
t
x
φ
and
()
t
y
φ
are both corrupted by the
same phase noise of the transmitter (TX) laser, their arithmetic difference
()
t
δ
is free of
phase noise. In practice, the phase noise immunity of PolSK is limited by the bandwidth of the
photodetectors [16]. It has been shown that 8-PolSK can tolerate laser linewidths as large as
01.0≈Δ
b
T
ν
[17], which is about 100 times greater than the phase noise tolerance of coherent
8-QAM (Section 5.3.3). This was a significant advantage in the early 1990s, when symbol
rates were only in the low GHz range. In modern systems, symbol rates of tens of GHz, in
conjunction with tunable laser having linewidths <100 kHz, has diminished the advantages of
PolSK. Recent results have shown that feedforward carrier synchronization enables coherent
detection of 16-QAM at
b
T
ν
Δ ~10
−5
[18], which is within the limits of current technology.
As systems are increasingly driven by the need for high spectral efficiency, polarization-
multiplexed QAM is likely to be more attractive because of its higher sensitivity (Section 4).
#86543 - $15.00 USD Received 20 Aug 2007; revised 9 Nov 2007; accepted 12 Nov 2007; published 9 Jan 2008
(C) 2008 OSA 21 January 2008 / Vol. 16, No. 2 / OPTICS EXPRESS 760