Measurements of BER performance for bipolar encoding of an SFS

This paper reports on the measurements of bit error rate (BER) performance for a broad-band optical communications scheme that encodes the power spectrum of an erbium-doped superfluorescent fiber source (SFS) with bipolar equivalent codes. The proposed scheme, like spectrum-sliced wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), suffers from the excess noise associated with the detection of a thermal-like source. BER calculations based on measured testbed characteristics and a simple model are compared with BER measurements for one and two active users. In addition, the performance of a single user in the presence of broad-band spectral interference is investigated, giving a preliminary estimate of multiuser capacity. This paper discusses various solutions for increasing network capacity and performance, relevant to the proposed scheme as well as to wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).