Power Penalty From Amplified Spontaneous Emission in Spatial Diversity Links for Fade Mitigation

We investigate the power penalty caused by excess amplified spontaneous emission in an optically preamplified receiver for a communications link where a multiwavelength spatial diversity transmitter is used to mitigate atmospheric fading. We compare measured receiver sensitivity for a four-wavelength 10.7-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero on-off-keyed system to theory using both the Gaussian noise approximation and chi square statistics.