Optik 124 (2013) 6013–6016

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Optik
journal homepage: www.elsevier.de/ijleo

Performance improvement for N × 80-Gb/s WDM transmission link

with optimized alternate polarization
Richa Bhatia a , Ajay K. Sharma b,∗ , Jyoti Saxena c
a
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Ambedkar Institute of Advanced Communication Technology and Research, Delhi 110031,
India
b
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, National Institute of Technology, Jalandhar 144011, Punjab, India
c
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Giani Zail Singh College of Engineering and Technology, Bathinda, Punjab, India

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: In this paper, it is shown that at a high bit rate of 80-Gb/s alternate polarization of adjacent bits in a
Received 29 November 2012 Wavelength Division Multiplexed (WDM) transmission link improves the system performance in terms
Accepted 20 April 2013 of improved Q factor and minimum bit error rate (BER). Alternate Polarization Return to Zero (al-PRZ)
further suppresses the non-linear effects at higher power levels of 25 dBm per channel and also improves
the transmission length to 640 km for a N × 80-Gb/s WDM system and hence results in an improvement
Keywords:
of BER to 10−20 .
Optical communication
© 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.
High bit rate optical modulation
Wavelength-Division-Multiplexing (WDM)
transmission
Alternate polarization

1. Introduction offers improvement in transmission quality through reduction of

Transmission of WDM systems over long transmission lengths
is affected by chromatic dispersion, polarization mode dispersion
(PMD) at high bit rate and fibre non-linearity at high power level.
These limitations can be overcome by the choice of appropriate
modulation format to a greater extent. The commonly used mod-
ulation formats are non return-to-zero (NRZ) and return-to-zero
(RZ). For higher bit rates specially designed double modulation
based NRZ and RZ modulation formats can be used, which can
reduce interference and non-linear effects to some extent. Use of
differential phase shift keying (DPSK) improves tolerance to opti-
cal noise improving optical signal to noise ratio. Then RZ-DPSK
at 10-Gb/s outperforms RZ for its higher tolerance to non-linear
effects [1]. To further increase the tolerance to non-linearities,
the polarization of every other bit is rotated by 90◦ , generating
alternate polarization RZ-DPSK (APol RZ-DPSK) [1]. Again, the alter-
nate polarization of adjacent symbols in 40 Gb/s RZ-differential
quadrature phase shift keying (RZ-DPSK) transmission system can
improve significantly system performance through suppression of
intra-channel non-linear impairments. [5]. Also at 40-Gb/s it has
been proved that al-PRZ offers better results for single channel as
well as WDM systems [2]. The al-PRZ based transmission system
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +91 181 2690301/02; fax: +91 181 2690932.
E-mail address: sharmaajayk@nitj.ac.in (A.K. Sharma).
non-linear effects at 40-Gb/s with a transmission length of 320 km.
All the above papers have implemented the WDM system at the
bit rate of 40-Gb/s or even lower. In this paper, we have extended
the work by increasing the bit rate to 80-Gb/s. Numerical inves-
tigations of al-PRZ signals and al-PNRZ signals with orthogonal
polarization between adjacent channels are made for 80-Gb/s opti-
cal transmission system. The characteristics of al-PRZ and al-PNRZ
for WDM transmission over standard single mode fibre (SSMF) are
compared with NRZ and RZ formats by means of numerical simu-
lations. At the receiver, a conventional non-polarization sensitive
receiver is considered.
2. Methodology of alternate polarization signal generation
at 80-Gb/s
The al-PRZ pulses are generated as shown in Fig. 1. A continu-
ous wave (CW) laser emits light at a wavelength of around 1.55 ␮m
and is fed to the Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) as carrier. A
pseudo random bit sequence (PRBS) generator creates the data bit
sequence which then is encoded by a RZ coder, which is further fed
as data input to the MZM. An 80-Gb/s RZ signal is then generated at
the output of MZM. The al-PRZ pulses are then realized by passing
these RZ signals through a second modulation stage of polarization
modulator. The polarization modulator is presented in Fig. 1.
The RZ signal is given to the polarization controller (PC) where
its state of polarization is adjusted to a linear polarization at an

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6014 R. Bhatia et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 6013–6016

Fig. 1. 80-Gb/s al-PRZ signal generation.

angle of +/4. The +/4 linear polarized light is then made to pass
through a polarization beam splitter (PBS), which can be considered
as two ideal linear polarizers oriented orthogonal to each other.
An ideal polarizer transmits the linear polarized component of the
input light coinciding with the transmission axis of the polarizer
and completely removes the orthogonal component. At the out-
put ports of PBS the signal is separated in x- and y-polarization
components of the incident light [3]. In a phase modulator (PM)
the y-component is modulated through switching the phase by the
40 GHz clock by phase difference of  between mark ‘1’ and space
‘0’. The x-component and phase modulated y-component is shown
in Fig. 2(a) and (b). For the generation of 80 Gb/s al-PRZ pulses
the two polarization components x-component and phase mod-
ulated y-component are then combined with a polarization beam
combiner (PBC) with device angle of +/4. The realization of polar-
ization modulator to generate any orthogonal state of polarization
can be done by adjusting the PC and the PBS [3,4].
The signal spectrum of the 80-Gb/s al-PRZ signal is shown in
Fig. 2(c). The signal form of al-PRZ pulses as compared to RZ pulses
is the same, but the spectral form of al-PRZ pulses differ from the RZ
spectrum. There are additional spectral components every 40 GHz
in an al-PRZ spectrum, which can be explained by the combination
of the x-polarization which is unchanged component of the original
RZ spectrum and the phase modulated y-polarization component of
the original RZ spectrum. Due to this spectral form of AlpRZ pulses,
there may be an increase in the tolerance of narrow band filtering.

3. System setup

The simulation setup is shown in Fig. 3. At the transmitter

end, 80-Gb/s al-PRZ channels are symmetrically arranged in the
1550 nm transparent window. Each channel has pseudorandom
data words with a length of 29 bits. The bit word length is sufficient Fig. 2. (a) x-Component; (b) phase modulated y-component; (c) al-PRZ spectrum;
(d) signal form.
for the investigations of 80-Gb/s transmission systems [2]. All the
channels are co-polarized. The full width at half maximum of AlpRZ
pulses is 6.2 ps. Multiplexer (MUX) and Demultiplexer (DMUX)
circuits are made of optical bessel filters of sixth order.The filter
3 dB bandwidth depends on the choice of channel spacing and it
is taken as 80 GHz for 100 GHz channel spacing. The transmission
line has 8 × 80 km conventional SSMF [with D = 16 ps/nm/km,
S = 0.06 ps/nm2 /km] compensated with a dispersion compensating
fibre (DCF) in a post compensating scheme. Post compensating
scheme in 40 Gb/s al-PRZ system gives the best performance [2].
For optical amplification three erbium doped fibre amplifiers
(EDFAs) with noise figure of 6 dB are used in the configuration
as shown in Fig. 3. At the receiver conventional direct detection
Fig. 3. The al-PRZ N × 80-Gb/s system setup over 8 × 80-km SSMF with a post-
80-Gb/s receivers are used. The simulation setup parameters are
compensating dispersion scheme.
shown in Table 1. The fibre parameters are shown in Table 2. The
 R. Bhatia et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 6013–6016 6015

Table 1
Simulation setup parameters.

Reference wavelength,  (nm) Transmission length, L (km) Bit rate (Gb/s) Channel spacing (GHz) MUX/DMU × bandwidth (GHz)

100 80
1550 8 × 80 80 80 70
60 70

Table 2 interference of neighbouring channels. The EDFAs are considered

Fibre parameters.
with a noise figure of 6 dB. To investigate the transmission perfor-
Parameters SSMF DCF mance the Q factor and bit error rate (BER) are used as evaluation
Fibre attenuation (dB/km) 0.2 0.5 criteria. The al-PRZ is compared with RZ, NRZ and al-PNRZ signals in
Dispersion (ps/nm/km) 16 −80 a 640-km (8 × 80 km) SSMF transmission link. Duty cycle for RZ and
Dispersion slope (ps/nm2 km) 0.06 −0.30 al-PRZ amounts to 0.5 (with linear rectangular shape). The results
Length (km) 80 16 are shown in Fig. 4. It can be seen from the graphs that till 10 dBm
Effective core area (␮m2 ) 80 35
power has not much effect on the behaviour of 80-Gb/s WDM sys-
Non-linear refractive index n2 (m2 /W) 13e−21 52e−21
tem with different modulation formats at 100 GHz channel spacing.
As we reduce the channel spacing, these impairments will increase.
The al-PRZ modulation (with improved parameters) again is the
best choice modulation format even at 80-Gb/s. Use of al-PRZ pulses
improves Q factor to 15.71 at −10 dBm power per channel and to a
Q factor of 9.03 at a high power of 25 dBm per channel as com-
pared to al-PNRZ with Q factor of 8.88 at −10 dBm and 3.19 at
25 dBm. Improvement with al-PRZ is by a factor 4 as compared
to RZ and NRZ formats. Again the maximum transmission distance
which was 320 km (4 × 80 km) [2] has been improved by a factor
of 2–640 km (8 × 80 km) using this improved modulation format
even at increased bit rate of 80-Gb/s for 8 channels in a WDM
transmission link.
In Fig. 4(b), BER of al-PRZ modulation is presented for different
input powers. The BER for al-PRZ modulation format varies from
10−56 at −10 dBm to 10−20 at 25 dBm compared to al-PNRZ mod-
ulation having BER variation from 10−19 at −10 dBm to 10−04 at
25 dBm input power. Hence the use of al-PRZ modulation format
significantly improves the maximum input power.

Fig. 4. 8 × 80-Gb/s WDM transmission over 8 × 80 km SSMF: (a) Q versus input

power per channel; (b) BER versus input power per channel at 100-GHz channel
spacing for RZ, NRZ, al-PNRZ and al-PRZ.

simulation system is realized using the commercially available

simulation tool.1

4. Results and discussion

N × 80-Gb/s WDM transmission: The investigated 80-Gb/s WDM

system setup is illustrated in Fig. 3. The 8 × 80-Gb/s WDM system
was analyzed with NRZ, RZ, al-PNRZ and al-PRZ pulses at 100 GHz
channel spacing. The optical Bessel filters of sixth-order and 3 dB
bandwidth of 80 GHz are used in MUX and DMUX.
For this system, the worst case i.e. the middle channel is evalu-
ated. The fifth channel shows the strongest effects due to non-linear
channel interactions, four wave mixing (FWM), stimulated Raman
scattering (SRS), cross phase modulation (XPM) caused due to the

Fig. 5. (a) Q versus input power per channel. (b) BER versus input power per channel
for different channel spacings in an 8 × 80-Gb/s al-PRZ based WDM system over
1
Optisystem, Optiwave, Canada. 640 km SSMF.
6016 R. Bhatia et al. / Optik 124 (2013) 6013–6016
Fig. 5(a) shows Q versus power input per channel for differ-
ent channel spacing in an 8 × 80-Gb/s al-PRZ based WDM system
over 640 km SSMF. For this purpose an 80 Gb/s WDM system with
equally polarized channels is considered. Depending on channel
spacing (100 G, 80 G, 60 G), different 3 dB bandwidths (80 GHz,
70 GHz, 70 GHz) of Bessel filters in MUX and DMUX are used.
As we reduce the channel spacing till 80 GHz performance is
limited by linear cross talk, but at 60 GHz channel spacing the
additional impairment is caused by the impact of XPM. Hence
60-GHz spacing has been achieved for 80-Gb/s WDM al-PRZ
based transmission link in the specified system configuration.
Further reduction of channel spacing and improvement of Q fac-
tor and BER can be achieved through use of optimized filtering
techniques.
5. Conclusion
In this paper, we demonstrate, for the first time, the use of
alternate polarization to suppress the dominant intra-channel non-
linear impairments in an 80-Gb/s RZ WDM transmission link. Our
simulation results show that Q factor can be significantly improved
to 15.71 and BER can be reduced up to 10−56 at an extended link
length of 640 km by applying al-PRZ modulation. Also a BER of
10−20 has been achieved at a high input power of 25 dBm per
channel, which shows an improvement in maximum input power.
Our results suggest that alternate polarization modulation scheme
could be a promising candidate for future high-speed optical trans-
mission systems.
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