Recent advances in coherent optical fiber communication systems

Research and development of coherent optical fiber communications have been accelerated mainly because of the possibility of receiver sensitivity improvement reaching 20 dB, and partly because of the possibility of frequency-division multiplexing (FDM) with very fine frequency separation. In this paper, recent advances in the research on coherent optical fiber communication systems are reviewed, with emphasis on those reported in the past two years. The bit-error rate measurements so far reported are classified and investigated in four categories: PCM-ASK, PCM-FSK, PCM-PSK, and PCM-DPSK. The states-of-the-art of polarization-state stabilization techniques is also discussed.