Impact of noise and nonlinear distortion due to clipping on the BER performance of a 64-QAM signal in hybrid AM-VSB/QAM optical fiber transmission system

Experimental BER measurements of a 64-QAM signal in a hybrid AM-VSB/QAM optical fiber transmission system are shown to be in good agreement with a corrected and reinterpreted theory of impulsive and Gaussian noise based on Middleton's class B impulsive noise model. Fiber dispersion induced distortion of the chirped laser output is also shown to adversely affect the QAM signal.