The effect of error control coding in multichannel FSK coherent lightwave communication systems influenced by laser phase noise

It has been shown that coherent optical fiber receivers with a two-filter structure (TFS) consisting of a wide-band IF filter and a narrow-band postdetection filter are less susceptible to the influence of phase noise. However, the expanded IF bandwidth required to achieve optimum sensitivity performance is large, particularly in multichannel FSK systems. Forward error control coding can relax the laser linewidth requirement and improve receiver sensitivity. In this paper a multichannel asynchronous FSK scheme equipped with (31, k) Reed-Solomon codes is used to verify the coding benefit. A systematic error probability analysis is developed and a stable and accurate performance evaluation procedure is provided. The sensitivity penalties due to the combined phase noise and interchannel crosstalk for both coded and uncoded systems are calculated for comparison. The results show that the performance reduction due to phase noise can be largely alleviated by choosing a proper code rate and an optimum value of the expanded IF bandwidth.