JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY

Alternative Modulation Formats in N 40 Gb/s

WDM Standard Fiber RZ-Transmission Systems
Anes Hodzic, Beate Konrad, and Klaus Petermann, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractA comparison of carrier-suppressed return-to-zero

(CSRZ) and single sideband return-to-zero (SSB-RZ) formats is
made in an attempt to find the optimum modulation format for
high bit rate optical transmission systems. Our results show that
CSRZ is superior to return-to-zero (RZ) and SSB-RZ with respect
to signal degradation due to Kerr nonlinearities and chromatic dispersion in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) as well as in
single-channel 40-Gb/s systems over standard single-mode fibers
(SSMF). It is shown that CSRZ enables a maximum spectral ef40 Gb/s WDM
ficiency of approximately 0.7 (b/s)/Hz in a
system with equally polarized channels. Furthermore, the CSRZ
format in
40 Gb/s WDM systems shows no further signal
degradation compared to single-channel transmission.
Index TermsCommunication system nonlinearities, optical
fiber communication, optical modulation, optical pulse generation,
wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).

I. INTRODUCTION

N order to achieve wavelength division multiplexing

(WDM) systems with high spectral efficiency, it is attractive
to operate at bit rates of 40 Gb/s per channel [1][3]. In conventional standard-fiber transmission lines, the return-to-zero (RZ)
and nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) formats are the two modulation
formats most often used. Recent analysis and investigations
[4], [5] have shown that RZ turns out to be superior compared
to conventional NRZ systems [5], at least as long standard
single-mode fibers are used as transmission media. On the
other hand, because of the narrower optical spectrum of the
NRZ format, NRZ enables higher spectral efficiency in WDM
systems compared to RZ in the linear regime. As alternatives
to RZ and NRZ several other modulation formats like carrier-suppressed return-to-zero (CSRZ) [7][9], single-sideband
RZ (SSB-RZ) [9][11], and duobinary modulations [12][14]
have been proposed. There are different factors that should
be considered for the right choice of modulation format, such
as spectral efficiency, power margin, and tolerance against
group-velocity dispersion (GVD) and against fiber nonlinear
effects like self-phase modulation (SPM), cross-phase modulation (XPM), four-wave mixing (FWM), and stimulated Raman
scattering (SRS).
In this paper, we analyze 40-Gb/s WDM RZ-, CSRZ-, and
SSB-RZ-based transmission systems over standard-fiber lines.
So far, it has been shown [7][9] that CSRZ has a larger tolerance toward the degradation of signal quality with respect

Manuscript received April 10, 2001; revised January 10, 2002.

The authors are with the Fachgebiet Hochfrequenztechnik, Technische Universitt Berlin, Berlin 10587, Germany (e-mail: hodzic@hft.ee.tu-berlin.de).
Publisher Item Identifier S 0733-8724(02)02557-4.

to SPM and GVD compared to RZ. CSRZ format reduces the

nonlinear impairments [7] in SSMF-based dispersion-managed
lines. RZ- and CSRZ-based WDM systems have been analyzed
for spectral efficiencies up to 0.4 (b/s)/Hz [7] and [9] or 0.8
(b/s)/Hz for orthogonal polarization between adjacent channels
[2]. Results of [7], [9] indicated that the CSRZ format keeps
SPM tolerance high, even in the WDM configuration, and that
there is no excess penalty caused by the XPM- and FWM-induced nonlinear crosstalk.
In this paper, we will demonstrate the maximum achievable
Gb/s WDM systems with equally
spectral efficiency in
polarized channels over SSMF for RZ, CSRZ, and SSB-RZ
modulation formats. Thus, it is the aim of this paper to determine
an optimal RZ-like modulation format in order to improve transmission characteristics and to achieve higher spectral efficiency
in RZ-based 40 Gb/s/ch WDM transmission systems. The investigated modulation formats were studied regarding their properties with respect to nonlinear effects and chromatic dispersion
and due to these impairments the maximum limit of spectral effiGb/s systems will be
ciency for RZ, SSB-RZ, and CSRZ
determined. The tolerance of all modulation formats to SPM and
GVD in 40-Gb/s transmission systems will also be investigated.
For each format, the optimal fiber type and dispersion-compensating scheme will be recommended. This paper is organized
in three parts. First, the theoretical description and demonstration of signal generation is presented. Thereby, the general features (spectrum, dispersion tolerance) of all modulation formats
will be described. In the second part, the single-channel 40-Gb/s
system will be considered and the impacts of single-channel effects are analyzed. Finally, the limiting effects and performance
Gb/s WDM systems will be presented.
of
In order to investigate the performance differences between
these three modulation formats, two different evaluation criteria
have been used: the system penalty and the eye-opening penalty
(EOP). These two evaluation criteria provide different insights
into transmission characteristics. The system penalty evaluation
enables the comparison of results of numerical simulations with
experimental results and yields the information about achievable bit error rate (BER) of the transmission. On the other hand,
with system penalty, it cannot be clearly distinguished between
different effects, such as GDV, SPM, and XPM, that occur in the
fiber. For this purpose, the EOP evaluation can be very helpful
for the investigation of different transmission regimes (linear
and nonlinear) and for different modulation formats.
The system penalty is defined as the difference of receiver
sensitivity at 10 BER between back-to-back (BTB) and the

0733-8724/02$17.00 2002 IEEE

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY

transmission case, as shown in (1) at the bottom of the page.

Generally, in numerical simulations, the BER is simulated with
a relatively low number of bits in order to reduce the computing
time. Thus, the assumption is made that the noise is Gaussian
distributed. This assumption is not valid any more in presence
of intersymbol interferences (ISI). In order to make a BER estimation taking into account the ISI effects for numerical investigation, the technique described in [15] is used in this paper.
The EOP is defined as
EOP [dB]
Eye opening back to back
Eye openingafter transmission

(2)

The EOP of 1 dB is chosen as a maximum limit for the transmission quality. EOP of 1 dB represents 80% eye opening.
II. GENERATION OF MODULATION FORMATS
The generation of different modulation formats can be
achieved in different ways [7], [9]. In this paper, different
modulation formats have been realized as depicted in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1(a) presents the generation of RZ signals. The light of
the continuous wave (CW) pump is externally modulated in
MachZehnder interferometer (MZI) with a 40-Gb/s NRZ
electrical signal. The model used for numerical simulation of
MZI is based on [16]. A random bit word of length 2 is used
to generate the electrical RZ signal by filtering rectangular
RZ-coded pulse with a filter of bandwidth equivalent to 80%
of the bit rate. The first MZI is biased at the quadrature point.
The final signal forming of the RZ pulses takes place in the
second modulator. The second modulator is also biased at
the quadrature point. Thus, the second modulator is driven
with a 40-GHz sine-clock signal. The 40-Gb/s RZ signal
spectrum is illustrated in Fig. 2(a). It shows the typical RZ
signal spectrum with a spectral width of 80 GHz between the
first two sidebands. The modulator parameters are set such that
all three modulation formats have the same duty cycle in spite
of different methods of generation and different signal forms,
indicating the same FWHM pulsewidths for all investigated
modulation formats. The duty cycle for all three modulation
.
formats amounts to
The generation of CSRZ and SSB-RZ signals is presented in
Fig. 1(b) and 1(c) and can be mathematically described as
(3)
Thus,
and
fields of MZI 2.

describe the optical input and output

represents the optical field of a 40-Gb/s

System penalty [dB]

Fig. 1. Generation of 40-Gb/s signals (a) RZ , (b) CSRZ, and (c) SSB-RZ.

NRZ signal, which is generated after MZI 1. and represent

is biased with bias direct
the phases of two modulator arms.
current (dc) voltage of
.
and
are defined as
(4)
(5)
and
are the amplitudes of a sine-clock signal (
) and
represents the phase difference between the two
sine-clock signals.
is voltage, which is required in the modulator for a -phase shift.
MZI 1 generates a 40-Gb/s NRZ optical signal through the
external modulation of the CW pump. The final signal forming
takes place in MZI 2, which is driven with sine-clock signals [7],
[8]. Depending on bias points of the second modulator, different
modulation formats can be realized.

Receiver sensitivity (back to back)

Receiver sensitivity (transmission)

(1)

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HODZIC

Gb/s WDM STANDARD FIBER RZ TRANSMISSION

GHz (the half

The frequency of the sine clock is
bit rate). The mathematical representation of generated CSRZ
signal is depicted in (6)(8) as
(CSRZ)

(6)

(CSRZ)

(7)

(CSRZ)

(a)

(8)

(b)

The CSRZ spectrum is presented in Fig. 2(b). The carrier component of the CSRZ signal spectrum is suppressed and the spectral width between two first sidebands amounts to 40 GHz. This
represents a spectral reduction with factor of two, compared to
spectral width between two first sidebands in the RZ case.
For generation of SSB-RZ signals, both amplitudes of the
sine-clock signals are equal and amount to
. The phase difference is set to
. The second
modulator is biased at the
point. The frequency of the sine
clock is
GHz for the generation of 40-Gb/s
SSB-RZ signals. The generated spectrum of an SSB-RZ signal
is represented in Fig. 2(c), and the final mathematical description is (9)(11), shown at the bottom of the next page. Through
the modulation in MZI 2, the left sideband of the signal is suppressed, as can be seen from Fig. 2(c). Due to suppression of one
sideband, an improved transmission characteristic compared to
RZ signals can be achieved. At the same time, it is expected that
WDM systems with higher spectral efficiency can be realized.
III. SINGLE-CHANNEL 40-GB/S SYSTEMS

(c)
Fig. 2. Optical spectra of 40-Gb/s modulation formats (a) RZ, (b) CSRZ, and
(c) SSB-RZ.

For CSRZ signal generation, the second modulator is biased

at the zero point (
) and
. equals .

In this section, the behavior of different modulation formats

in a 40-Gb/s single channel transmission at 1550 nm is analyzed.
Our main focus is set on the system impairments due to SPM
and interaction between SPM and GVD. For the single-channel
analysis, the system from Fig. 3 is used. Fig. 3 represents an
Gb/s CSRZ-based WDM system. The only difference
between modulation formats is the second modulation stage
(MZI 2). For the single-channel investigations, just one channel
at 1550 nm is considered. In this case, an optical Bessel filter
of the sixth order with a 3-dB filter bandwidth of 60 GHz replaces the multiplexer (MUX) and the demultiplexer (DMUX),
as shown in Fig. 3, respectively. For all investigations in this
paper, an amplifier spacing of 80 km is used.
and
in each
SSMF span are fully compensated by the dispersion compensating fiber (DCF) in a postcompensating scheme. The post-

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY

compensating scheme is used in the single-channel case because of better system penalties compared to the precompensating scheme in 40-Gb/s RZ transmission [6]. Pre- and postcompensation will be discussed further in Fig. 8. The values for
the nonlinearity and dispersion values of the used SSMF and
DCF fibers are given in Table I. The attenuation of the transmission line is compensated within the span with an inline erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA). The inline EDFA consists
of two EDFAs, one before and one after the DCF fiber. The input
power in the DCF fiber has been kept smaller than 5 dBm
so that the nonlinear effects in the DCF fiber can be neglected.
In order to study the influence of the fiber nonlinearities, the
amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise in the EDFAs is
not considered for single-channel transmission. The received
channel is directly detected and electrically filtered. After the
photodiode in the receiver, a Bessel low-pass filter of the third
order with 28-GHz electrical bandwidth is placed. This yields a
conversion of the received signals to NRZ in the electrical domain. For the numerical investigation, random bit sequences of
length 2 are used. As described in the Appendix, this number

of bits is sufficient for a proper investigation of the transmission

characteristics. The pulse propagation is solved numerically by
the split-step Fourier method [17]. Numerical simulations are
realized with the simulation tool VPItransmission Maker 4.0
[18]. The aforementioned single-channel system configuration
is used for all investigations to be described.
A. Maximum Penalty for Single-Channel Transmission
For lower channel powers, the maximum transmission length
is determined by the accumulated noise in the system. For
higher channel powers, the system behavior is limited through
the nonlinear effects in the fiber. In the case of a cascaded
single-channel transmission, the most dominant nonlinear
effects are Kerr nonlinearities as expressed by SPM. The results
of numerical investigations for the SPM limit for different modulation formats are shown in Fig. 4, displaying the maximum
with maximum eye-opening penalty of 1 dB
span count
as a function of power launched into the fiber. From Fig. 4,
it can clearly be seen that the CSRZ and SBB-RZ have better

(SSB - RZ)

(9)

(SSB - RZ)

(10)

(SSB - RZ)

(11)

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HODZIC

Fig. 3.

System setup for

Gb/s WDM STANDARD FIBER RZ TRANSMISSION

N 2 40 Gb/s CSRZ-based WDM transmission system over SSMF fiber.

TABLE I
FIBER PARAMETERS

Fig. 4. Maximum transmission length at 1 dB EOP for different input powers

in 40-Gb/s single-channel system over SSMF.

properties due to SPM than RZ. It turns out that the product
) and maximum span count
is
of input channel power (
a nearly constant for each modulation format, which will be
.
can be used as an indicator of system
denoted
can be defined in logarithmic
tolerance for SPM effects.
units as [19]
[dBm]

[dBm]

(12)

Thus, CSRZ tolerates 2 and 6 dB more power per channel than

RZ and NRZ transmissions, respectively. These advantages are
further justified in Fig. 5. Fig. 5 shows the system penalty of
single-channel transmission for different input powers with RZ,

Fig. 5. System penalty for different input powers in a 4

40-Gb/s channel transmission.

2 80 km SSMF

CSRZ, and SSB-RZ format, respectively, in a 40-Gb/s system

for a constant length (320 km yields four 80-km spans) of SSMF.
In the linear regime (for smaller input powers), all three modulation formats show almost the same transmission characteristics.
The differences between different modulation formats become
evident for higher input power. In this case, CSRZ and SSB-RZ
modulation provide an improvement of the system penalty of
5 dB compared to conventional RZ transmission. This improvement is especially important in long-haul systems enabling
higher power per channel and the better optical signal-to-noise
ratio (OSNR).

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY

(a)
(a)

(b)

(b)

(c)
Fig. 6. Dispersion tolerance for different modulation formats (a) RZ,
(b) CSRZ, and (c) SSB-RZ. The parameter is the eye-opening penalty, in
decibels.

(c)

B. Dispersion Tolerance
The maximum dispersion tolerance of each modulation
format is investigated. A higher dispersion tolerance is important, for example, in WDM systems in which the dispersion
compensation is realized at the central wavelength and where
dispersion slope compensation is another important issue.
It could be expected that, due to chromatic dispersion of
transmission fibers, the modulation format with the narrowest
signal spectrum will exhibit the highest dispersion tolerance.
The transmission is again considered over four spans. The
amount of residual dispersion has been changed through the

Fig. 7. Optimum fiber type for 40-Gb/s single-channel transmission over

4 80 km in (a) RZ, (b) CSRZ, and (c) SSB-RZ systems. The parameter is the
eye-opening penalty, in decibels.

length variation of DCF over all four spans. Dispersion tolerances of all modulation formats at different input powers (0,
3, 6, and 9 dBm) are investigated. As a base for the dispersion tolerance a comparison at the 1-dB EOP is considered.
The results are presented in Fig. 6. It can be seen that CSRZ
[see Fig. 6(b)] possess the highest dispersion tolerance of about
70 ps/nm, which is almost 30-ps/nm higher then the dispersion

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Gb/s WDM STANDARD FIBER RZ TRANSMISSION

tolerance of SSB-RZ and RZ modulations. Dispersion curves

in CSRZ and RZ cases show a symmetrical behavior and have
a minimum EOP at a residual dispersion of 0 ps/nm. Thus, it
is verified that the full compensation of dispersion is the best
choice for RZ and CSRZ single-channel transmission systems.
In the SSB-RZ case, the dispersion curves are asymmetrical and
the minimum EOP value is reached at 10 ps/nm residual dispersion. This can be explained with the asymmetrical spectrum
of SSB-RZ signals due to the suppression of one sideband [see
Fig. 2(c)]. Thus, the SSB-RZ modulation format shows no significant improvement of dispersion tolerance compared to the
RZ case. From Fig. 6, it can be seen again that the RZ modulation is more sensitive to nonlinearities.
C. Optimum Dispersion of Transmission Fiber
The next important question by the implementation of new
modulation format in 40-Gb/s transmission systems is the
optimum fiber for each modulation format. The investigation
is made with the same system configuration as in section B
over 4 80 km spans. Thus, different chromatic dispersions at
)
1550 nm in the fiber and different fiber effective areas (
are considered in order to find out the optimum fiber type for
40-Gb/s single-channel transmission. At the same time, we
considered the ASE noise in EDFAs, which are used for optical
amplification. The noise figure of each EDFA amounts to 4
dB. The results of this investigation are presented in Fig. 7.
From all three diagrams in Fig. 7, it can be seen that for all
modulation formats investigated, a fiber type with large
is advantageous, which indicates smaller impact of nonlinear
effects. Thus, the optimum chromatic dispersion in all three
cases is approximately 6 to 8 ps/nm km. In order to enable a
comparison of different commercially available fiber types,
their main parameters are included in diagrams. For future
40-Gb/s single-channel transmission systems, nonzero-dispersion-shifted fibers (NZDSF) with large effective area and
larger chromatic dispersion are, thus, advantageous in systems
with either RZ, CSRZ, or SSB-RZ modulation formats. SSMF
shows similar characteristics as large-area NZDSF. Due to the
fact that higher chromatic dispersion enables better suppression
of FWM effects (especially in systems with smaller channel
spacing), it can be expected that in WDM transmissions, SSMF
.
shows even better performances than NZDSF with large
Therefore, in the further investigation, we concentrate on
SSMF transmission.
IV. WDM

(a)

(b)

Gb/s SYSTEMS

For considering a
Gb/s WDM system, it is sufficient
to consider just four adjacent channels for system analysis, because main distortions are due to the interaction between adjacent channels. The analyzed transmission systems consist, generally, of four spans of SSMF fiber (total length 320 km), but
the results of this study can easily be extended to a higher span
number. For investigating
Gb/s systems over SSMF fiber
with CSRZ, SSB-RZ, and RZ modulation formats, the system
setup in Fig. 3 is used. In each channel, there are different statistically independent random bit sequences of length 2 and

(c)

Fig. 8. Optimum dispersion-compensating scheme in 4 40 Gb/s WDM

system (0.8-nm channel spacing) over 320-km SSMF in (a) RZ, (b) CSRZ, and
(c) SSB-RZ systems. The parameter is the eye-opening penalty, in decibels.

identical bit sequences are used for the analysis of all modulation formats. In order to investigate the impact of multichannel
effects (XPM, FWM, SRS) in each system, different channel
spacings (200, 100, 80, and 60 GHz) are considered. An equal

channel spacing is used between all channels. For all considered channel spacings, Bessel filters of the sixth order with optical 3-dB bandwidth of 60 GHz per channel are used in MUX
and DMUX, respectively. For each system, the worst channel
is evaluated, which turns out to be one of the two middle channels (channel 2), because this channel shows the strongest impair-ments due to nonlinear channel interaction (XPM, FWM,
SRS) caused by neighboring channels.
The optimum dispersion-compensating scheme is determined for each modulation format considering an channel
spacing of 100 GHz. As evaluation criteria the EOP is used.
The results are shown in Fig. 8, which represents the amount
of precompensation versus input power per channel. It can be
clearly seen that, in all three cases, the full postcompensation
(0% of precompensation) represents the optimum dispersion
Gb/s WDM transmission.
compensating scheme for
According to these results, further investigation has been made
with fully postcompensated WDM systems.
Fig. 9 shows results of numerical simulations for each
modulation format. In this investigation, the ASE noise is
not considered, in order to concentrate on the nonlinear
indicates the input power
effects (XPM, FWM). Thus,
per channel. In Fig. 9(a), the EOP for different input power
is shown in a 4 40 Gb/s RZ system. It can be seen that
the minimum channel spacing in the RZ case amounts to
60 GHz. For even smaller channel spacings, the eye of the
signal becomes fully closed. This implies a maximum spectral
efficiency of 0.66 (b/s)/Hz. This spectral efficiency can be
reached with CSRZ format [see Fig. 9(b)], even with fewer
penalties. SSB-RZ [see Fig. 9(c)] posseses a lower spectral
efficiency [ 0.5 (b/s)/Hz] compared to other modulations,
which is caused by the smaller tolerance of SSB-RZ toward
narrow-filtering effects due to the suppression of one signal
sideband. It is expected that the spectral efficiency of the
SSB-RZ modulation format can be further improved through
use of unequal spacing between the channels [20].
The limiting effects for each modulation format are different. In Fig. 9(a), two regions are distinguished for RZ. The
first region occurs for channel spacing greater than 80 GHz.
The system limitations in this region are caused only by
single-channel limitations (SPM beside GVD) and there are
no further impairments due to multichannel effects (XPM,
FWM). At smaller channel spacing ( 80 GHz) multichannel
effects (FWM, XPM) occur. Thus, the XPM yields a stronger
impact than FWM due to the high chromatic dispersion in
the fibers. For the SSB-RZ case [see Fig. 9(c)], it can be seen
that the power tolerance at 1-dB EOP gets extremely worse
for channel spacings smaller than 80 GHz. This indicates that
multichannel effects in SSB-RZ are more severe than those in
RZ or CSRZ, yielding a minimum channel spacing of 70 GHz
for the SSB-RZ system. For CSRZ format, no impairments
due to FWM or XPM at different channel spacings could be
detected. This means that CSRZ 4 40 Gb/s WDM system
shows no additional impairments due to nonlinear effects
compared to the single-channel CSRZ system, as long as
there is no significant spectral overlap between the channels.
If some improved narrowband filtering is used, it can be
expected that even smaller channel spacing (e.g., 50 GHz) can
be realized in CSRZ transmission. These results are supported
by experimental results for WDM systems with 100-GHz

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY

(a)

(b)

(c)
Fig. 9. Eye-opening penalty for different input powers at different channel
spacing in 4 40 Gb/s WDM system over 320 km SSMF in (a) RZ, (b) CSRZ,
and (c) SSB-RZ formats.

channel spacing, as shown in [7]. Thus, CSRZ combines the

best features of all three modulation formats in 4 40 Gb/s
WDM systems over SSMF fibers.
V. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, CSRZ showed the best tolerance to the SPM
effect, as well as the largest dispersion tolerance among all modGb/s CSRZ systems over
ulation formats investigated.
standard single-mode fiber may be realized with the same performance as single-channel 40-Gb/s systems, up to a spectral efficiency of approximately 0.7 (b/s)/Hz. The results of this paper

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noise distributions. From this figure, it is evident that a random

word length of 2 bits is sufficient for a correct numerical simulation of 40-Gb/s transmission. There are almost no differences
values between 2 and 2 bit words.
of
For the optimum number of bits in the EOP case [see
Fig. 10(b)], the same setup without consideration of noise in
the system is used. The same random bit words are used as
case. From Fig. 10(b), it can be clearly seen that
in the
for EOP values below 1 dB, the differences between different
numbers of bits vanish, becoming larger for higher input power
values. In this case, there is very little difference between 2
and 2 , so that 2 can be considered as the optimum for the
numerical analysis of EOP in 40-Gb/s transmission systems.
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40-Gbit/s optical doubinary channels, in Proc. OFC, San Jose, CA,
1998, TuI2, pp. 4951.
[15] C. J. Anderson and J. A. Lyle, Technique for evaluating system performance using Q in numerical simulations exhibiting intersymbol interference, Electron. Lett., vol. 30, pp. 7172, Jan. 1994.
[16] F. Koyama and K. Iga, Freqeuncy chirping in external modulators, J.
Lightwave Technol., vol. 6, Jan. 1988.
[17] G. P. Agrawal, Nonlinear Fiber Optics, 2nd ed. San Diego, CA: Academic, 1995.
[18] VPItransmission Maker 4.0, VPI Systems, Inc., Holmdel, NJ.

(b)
Fig. 10. Optimum length of random bit words for numerical investigation of
versus number of bits
40 Gb/s transmissions over 4 80 km SSMF (a) Q
(input power P
= 3 dBm) (b) EOP versus number of bits.

can be used for upgrading existing SSMF-based optical networks, as well as for the design of new high bit rate networks
with higher capacity and improved spectral efficiency. Further
work is still required with respect to the usage of NZDSF in the
transmission line, improved dispersion compensation (hybrid
compensation), prechirping (through chirp in external modulators), distributed optical amplification (Raman amplifier), and
improved optical filtering (AWG filters).
APPENDIX
The optimum number of bits for the numerical simulation is
determined for both evaluation criteria (EOP and BER) used in
this paper. The determination of the optimum (sufficient) bit
number is important in order to find the best compromise between the computing time and the error of the numerical simulations. The investigation for the optimum bit number is made
by using a system setup for 40-Gb/s RZ single-channel transfactor is determined
mission over 4 80 km SSMF. The
according to [15], as shown in Fig. 10(a). The random bit words
with lengths from 2 to 2 bits are considered. Each bit word
consists of equal number of marks and spaces. For calculation of
each point in Fig. 10(a), 20 different noise distributions are considered, so that each point represents the mean value of different

10

JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY

[19] J.-P. Elbers and A. Frbert, Reduced model to describe SPM-limited

fiber transmission in dispersion-managed lightwave systems, J. Select.
Topics Quantum Electron., vol. 6, pp. 276281, Mar./Apr. 2000.
[20] W. Idler, S. Bigo, Y. Frignac, B. Franz, and G. Veith, Vestigal side band
demultiplexing for ultra high capacity (0.64 bit/s/Hz) transmission of
128 40 Gb/s channels, in Proc. OFC, Anaheim, CA, 2001, MM3,
pp. 13.

Anes Hodzic was born in Sjenica, Bosnia and Hercegowina, in 1975. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree
in electrical engineering from the Technische Universitt Berlin, Berlin, Germany, in 1999. He is currently
pursuing the Dr.-Ing. degree at the Technische Universitt Berlin.
His research interests include design criteria for
high-bit rate transmission systems.

Beate Konrad was born in Hameln, Germany,

in 1974. She received the Dipl.-Ing. degree in
electrical engineering from the University Hannover,
Hannover, Germany, in 1998.
Since 1998, she has been a Research Associate
at the Institut fr Hochfrequenztechnik-und Halbleiter-Systemtechnologien, Technical University
Berlin, Berlin, Germany, where she is engaged in
research work on high-speed fiber-optic communication systems.

Klaus Petermann (M76SM85) was born in

Mannheim, Germany, on October 2, 1951. He
received the Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technische Universitt
Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany, in 1974
and 1976, respectively.
From 1974 to 1976, he was a Research Associate
at the Institut fr Hochfrequenztechnik, Technische
Universitt Braunschweig, where he worked on optical waveguide theory. From 1977 to 1983, he was
with AEG-Telefunken, Forschungsinstitut Ulm, Germany, where he was engaged in research on semiconductor lasers, optical fibers,
and optical fiber sensors. In 1983. he became a Full Professor at the Technische Universitt Berlin, where his research interests are optical fiber communications and integrated optics. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE PHOTONICS
TECHNOLOGY LETTERS and a member of the board of the Verean Deutscher
Electrotechniker (VDE).
Dr. Petermann is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science.
In 1993, he received the Leibniz Award from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.