A general and rigorous WDM receiver model targeting 10-40-Gb/s channel bit rates

We present a general and rigorously formulated dynamic receiver model aiming at 10-40-Gb/s wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) system design applications. A demultiplexing (DEMUX) characteristic with periodic transfer function has been treated in detail and it has been indicated how the model should be adjusted to take into consideration a general type of noise spectral density (NSD). The bit error ratio (BER) is evaluated accounting for the influence of non-Gaussian detected amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise, noise correlation between stochastic noise samples in the receiver, the gain and effective noise figure variation with wavelength of optical amplifiers, channel crosstalk, and intersymbol interference (ISI) effects caused by nonideal signal modulation, fiber dispersion, fiber nonlinearities, optical MUX, and DEMUX filtering and the impulse response of the electrical low-pass filter in the receiver. Also, the influence of shot and thermal noise is taken into account. Numerical results for the BER are presented considering a realistic 16-channel 10-Gb/s WDM system operating in the C-band using normal transmission fibers and including cascaded erbium-doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) with dispersion compensating fibers.