ASK multiport optical homodyne receivers

Several types of ASK multiport homodyne receivers are investigated, and the impact of the phase noise and of the shot noise on these receivers is analyzed. The simplest structure is the conventional multiport receiver with a matched filter in each branch. This structure can tolerate
\DeltavT
[
\deltav
is the laser finewidth and
T
is the bit duration) of several percent with a small power penalty (3.6 percent for 1-dB penalty and 5.2 percent for 2-dB penalty). Optimization of branch filters of conventional multiport receivers does not help when the linewidth (and the penalty) is small but does improve the receiver performance for larger linewidths. The most important point of the paper is the novel wide-band filter-rectifier-narrow-band filter (WIRNA) structure, proposed and investigated here for the first time for optical communication systems. It is shown that the optimized WIRNA homodyne receivers are extremely robust with respect to the phase noise: the WIRNA tolerable value of
\DeltavT
is 3.6 percent for 1-dB penalty and more than 50 percent for 2-dB penalty. Thus, the WIRNA structure opens, for the first time, the possibility of constructing homodyne receivers operating at several hundred megabits per second with conventional DFB lasers without complicated external cavities. Under no-phase-noise conditions, all the multiport receivers investigated here have the same performance, which is identical to that of heterodyne ASK receivers. In addition, the optimized WIRNA receivers can tolerate tapproximately) the same laser linewidth as the heterodyne ASK receivers. Thus, the main difference between the WIRNA multiport homodyne and heterodyne receivers is that the former shifts the processing to a lower frequency range, in return for a more complicated implementation. This difference makes the WIRNA multiport homodyne receivers particularly attractive at high (say, several gigabit per second) bit rates.