Effect of nonuniform laser FM response on the performance of multichannel heterodyne FSK systems using optical amplifiers

A theoretical analysis is provided to evaluate the performance of optical frequency division multiplexed systems taking into considerations the combined effect of receiver noise, laser phase noise and nonuniform FM response characteristic of a practical DFB laser. To overcome the effect of nonuniform frequency modulation characteristic of semiconductor lasers, two different linecoding schemes are used for the laser driving signal. The crosstalk penalty due to the combined effect of nonuniform FM response and phase noise of lasers is evaluated. The improvement in receiver sensitivity due to optical preamplifier is also estimated. The computed results show that the performance of the system is highly degraded due to the effect of laser nonuniform fm response and can be reduced substantially by using linecoding. Further, there is considerable improvement in receiver sensitivity due to the use of an optical preamplifier in the absence of phase noise. In the presence of phase noise there is a reduction in receiver sensitivity.