Chromatic fiber dispersion in single-mode coherence multiplex systems and its impact on digital transmission

Abstract¿Coherence multiplexing (CM) is a relatively unknown form of optical CDMA, which is particularly suitable in medium bit rate, small-scale optical networks like access networks, LANs or optical interconnects. Despite the small bit rates and small distances, this technique is rather sensitive to chromatic fiber dispersion, since broadband sources have to be used. In this paper, the impact of chromatic dispersion on the performance of a digital transmission system using CM and binary PSK will be studied. Moreover, it will be proven that the performance of a system with significantly dispersive fiber links can be enhanced by performing QPSK modulation, rather than the so far more conventional binary PSK modulation