Effect of optical amplifier noise on laser linewidth requirements in long haul optical fiber communication systems with Costas PLL receivers

The impact of optical amplifier noise is analyzed in investigating the performance of optical long-haul PSK homodyne communication systems with Costas phase locked loop (PLL) receivers. The laser linewidth requirement for an optically amplified system becomes relaxed in comparison with the system with no optical amplifier, owing to the fact that the effect of incomplete phase tracking becomes less important as a larger signal power is demanded to maintain a fixed bit-error rate. Also, it is found that the power splitting ratio regarding the power distributions for the I-arm and the Q-arm of a Costas loop can vary in a wide range without having much influence on the performance of an optically amplified system. As a matter of fact, the power penalty induced by incomplete phase tracking for a system with a large number of cascaded optical amplifiers is mainly due to the finite phase error and not due to the power splitting ratio, and this may fail a previously-reported method for finding the required laser linewidth by assigning a certain amount of power penalty that is due to the power splitting ratio.