Advantages of Alternate Modulation Formats in 40Gb/s

Transmission
Andrey V. Kanaev,
Corning Incorporated
Sullivan Park
Corning, NY 14831

ABSTRACT: We analyzed linear and nonlinear properties of non-return-to-zero (NRZ), return-to-zero

with 50% duty cycle (RZ50), return-to-zero with 33% duty cycle (RZ33), carrier-suppressed return-to-zero
CSRZ, and differential phase shift keying (DPSK) modulation formats in order to predict the comparable
advantages of their implementation in 40Gb/s WDM systems. We showed the advantage of RZ type
formats over NRZ results from the trade off between better nonlinear tolerance and linear impairments such
as inter-channel cross-talk and dispersion penalties. We estimated that in 40Gb/s 0.4 spectral efficiency
WDM system on 10 100km spans of standard single mode fiber RZ33 format has Q value 1.5dB higher
than NRZ. We also found that in a such system DPSK with controlled chip outperforms RZ33 by 0.8dB Q
due to the difference in limiting nonlinear impairments and superior linear properties.

Key words: Modulation formats, cross-phase modulation, four wave mixing, dispersion management

1. Introduction
The fast growth of bandwidth demands is driving the development of high capacity optical fiber
transmission links. The advent of 40Gb/s WDM systems has raised the issue of compromise between
combating single channel impairments and achieving high spectral efficiency of the transmission.
Indeed, 10Gb/s optical transmission links are limited primarily by cross-channel impairments such as cross-
phase modulation (XPM) 1 and four wave mixing (FWM) 2. However, higher bit rates lead to more
dispersed transmission and that shifts the dominating impairments to single channel nonlinearities. At the
same time, overall WDM system performance remains dependent on linear inter-channel cross-talk and
linear penalty due to imperfect dispersion compensation across the channel map. These facts prompted the
interest to alternative signal modulations that attempted to address all of the above 40Gb/s transmission
issues simultaneously 3.
Recently, extensive sets of WDM simulation were performed to compare performance of different
modulation formats4,5. However, while the advantages of certain encoding techniques were shown for
particular system configurations the underlined limiting physical mechanisms inherent to those techniques
were not clearly identified. Indeed, it is difficult to determine the weight of particular impairments in the
complex optical transmission link for different modulation formats and how their effect changes with the
link modification.
In this paper, we analyze generic 40Gb/s WDM systems based on different modulation formats by
investigating their linear and nonlinear impairments separately. This approach takes advantage of the fact
that in such systems nonlinear cross-channel impairments are significantly lower than other impairments
even at 0.4 spectral efficiency, which is provisioned for 40Gb/s transmission. In return this analysis
provides comprehensive understanding of the properties and limitations of modulation formats that can be
applied to specific configurations of optical transmission links.
During the past 20 years, optical communication systems primarily used NRZ modulation format.
It is known that RZ encoding is more robust to single channel nonlinearities than NRZ modulation format 6
because of its shorter dispersion length and therefore less SPM-GVD distortion. The highly dispersed
transmission characteristic to 40Gb/s bit rate introduces entirely different limiting mechanism for RZ signal
type encoding single channel XPM (sXPM) 7 and single channel FWM (sFWM) 7,8. sXPM is nonlinear
interaction between adjacent pulses that results in nonlinear frequency shift in the overlap region. The
leading pulse shifts to the red spectral zone and trailing pulse shifts to the blue spectral zone. This
impairment translates into timing jitter and amplitude fluctuations. sFWM is another consequence of

Optical Transmission Systems and Equipment for WDM Networking, Benjamin B. Dingel,
64 Brewster R. Hemenway, Achyut Kumar Dutta, Ken-Ichi Sato, Editors, Proceedings of SPIE
Vol. 4872 (2002) © 2002 SPIE · 0277-786X/02/$15.00

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 nonlinear interaction when two- or three- pulses overlap in time. It results in amplitude jitter in “ones” and
ghost pulse generation in “zero” slots.
We will show that under these conditions performance improvement can be achieved either by
implementing shorter duration RZ pulses or by signal phase modulation. Unfortunately, this usually leads
to increased spectral width and therefore higher linear penalties. To avoid the trade off between linear and
nonlinear properties phase shift keying modulation formats should be added to the list of considered signal
encoding. DPSK class formats do not require coherent detection and that makes them attractive for
implementation in the long haul optical communication links. Since DPSK signal does not contain any
amplitude modulation, neither sXPM nor sFWM can affect its performance. The limiting nonlinearity for
such transmission is SPM-GVD interaction that acts on the chirp induced by rising and falling edges of
NRZ pulse modulator. We will show that, with appropriate control of this chirp DPSK can outperform
amplitude shift keying formats in single channel propagation while keeping its linear properties very close
to the superior linear properties of NRZ format.

2. Schematics of the 40Gb/s transmission link

A generic set up for the single channel numerical experiment was chosen. The transmitter
consisted of an NRZ signal generator and additional Mach-Zehnder (MZ) modulator to produce RZ type
signal modulation. RZ50 was obtained by driving MZ at the bit rate clock frequency and biasing it at
0.5Vπ. RZ33 was obtained by driving the MZ at half bit rate clock frequency and biasing it at zero. CSRZ
with 66% duty cycle was obtained by driving the MZ at the half bit rate clock frequency and biasing it at
Vπ. To obtain DPSK format the Phase Modulator (PM) controlled by a differentially pre-coded NRZ signal
was used. The single fiber transmission line consisted of 10 100 km spans of standard single mode fiber
with positive dispersion of +17ps/nm/km and ten dispersion compensation modules (DCM). The DCM
included dual stage amplification with 3dB noise figure EDFAs and 11dB and 22dB gain, respectively.
Low noise level was chosen to emphasize the impact of nonlinearities. The dispersion compensation fiber
had negative dispersion of -100ps/nm/km. Amplifier gain was kept constant at all launch powers. The
residual dispersion per span was optimized for each modulation format by changing the length of the DCM
fiber.
The electrical and optical Bessel filters of the fifth and third order, respectively, were used at the
direct-detection receiver. Their bandwidth was optimized for each modulation format. An additional
interferometer with one bit delay circuit was added to the model DPSK receiver.
Linear cross-talk simulations were performed on the back-to-back three channel system consisting
of the transmitter, VOA, amplifier, and receiver. VOA was tuned so that the power per channel and OSNR
corresponded to their values in single channel simulations. The cross-talk penalty reflected the difference
between single channel and three channel performance. Dispersion penalties were calculated by adding
idealized linear loss-less fiber to back-to-back experiment and subtracting the obtained Q value from the Q
value obtained without dispersive fiber. Numerical simulations of nonlinear Schroedinger equation were
carried out using pseudo random bit sequences of 1024 bits.

3. Linear properties

At the same average power per channel RZ formats provide larger eye opening than NRZ due to
smaller duty cycles. This leads to their higher back-to-back receiver sensitivity as it can be seen from single
channel data in Figure 2. DPSK Q value is equal to that of NRZ because the phase of the light wave is
coded by NRZ signal. Reduction of the duty cycle in ASK formats comes with the price of lower spectral
efficiency. This leads to significant increase of linear cross talk for RZ type formats compared to NRZ
formats. The trade-off between receiver sensitivity and spectral efficiency for different modulation formats
is shown in Figure 1 for 25dB OSNR (5dBm power per channel), which is typical for 40Gb/s transmission.
Performance of NRZ was virtually unchanged and DPSK suffered approximately 0.2dBQ penalty at 0.4
spectral efficiency compared to single channel simulation. Their cross talk increased slightly for tighter
channel spacing. Hence, performance of these modulation formats was mostly limited by ASE. On the
other hand, RZ33 and RZ50 were strongly affected by linear inter-channel cross--talk that resulted in 0.9dB
and 1.5dB Q penalty, respectively at 100GHz channel spacing. CSRZ exhibited performance limited by the

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 mix of ASE and linear cross-talk with 0.7dB Q penalty at 0.4 spectral efficiency. Tighter than 100GHz
channel spacing imposed significant penalties on all RZ type formats.
Linear cross-talk scales differently for modulation formats with OSNR therefore its proper values
are required for WDM system analysis. Figure 2 shows the linear cross-talk penalties for different
modulation formats as a function of power per channel at 0.4 spectral efficiency. The common trend for all
signal encoding is that strong power dependence of linear cross-talk penalties starts at 0dBm power per
channel (20dB OSNR). However, NRZ and DPSK experience almost no impact from neighboring channels
up to 4dBm power per channel (24dB OSNR). The maximum penalty growth is observed for RZ50 with
1.1dB Q penalty at 4dBm power per channel. RZ33 and CSRZ follow with 0.7dB Q and 0.5dB Q penalties,
respectively.
Tolerance to dispersion for modulation formats is shown in Figure 3a for 25dB OSNR. NRZ
incurs significantly less penalties than RZ33, RZ50, and CSRZ at higher than 40ps/nm residual dispersion
and comparable penalties at low residual dispersion. DPSK possesses the same tolerance as NRZ at lower
than 30ps/nm of accumulated dispersion, after which value its penalties becomes about 0.5dBQ higher than
for NRZ. OSNR reduction leads to decrease of dispersion penalties. This fact is illustrated by Figure 3a,
which presents dispersion tolerance of the same modulation formats at 20dB OSNR. The difference
between RZ33, RZ50, CSRZ, and NRZ is diminished as can be expected. Reduction of DPSK penalties is
solely due to poor back-to-back performance at zero accumulated dispersion.
In general, in the absence of noise modulation formats with more compact spectra have less
difference in group velocities and hence less eye distortion with accumulated dispersion. That is why
shorter duty cycle formats experience more linear penalties at high residual dispersion. ASE presence
shadows these penalties when the eye distortions due to dispersion are smaller than the noise level.

4. Nonlinear properties

Optimized single channel optical transmission is limited by nonlinear impairments. The power
level per channel that brings the best system performance determines signal tolerance to nonlinearities. We
performed an extensive series of single channel simulations to compare NRZ, RZ50, RZ33, CSRZ, and
DPSK modulation formats.
Results of these simulations for different modulation format performance are presented in Figure 4
by plotting Q as a function of power for standard single mode fiber and DMF, respectively. The dispersion
map including pre-compensation, post-compensation, and residual dispersion per span was optimized.
DPSK exhibited superior performance and outperformed RZ33 by 0.3dB. In addition, RZ formats show
great improvement over NRZ. Among them RZ33 exhibits the best performance providing 2dBQ
advantage over NRZ together with the ability to operate in the linear regime at 2dBm higher power.
The total Q value incorporates linear and nonlinear penalties, thus the difference in performance can be
separated into linear receiver sensitivity and tolerance to nonlinearities. The DPSK format is a NRZ based
signal and its linear receiver sensitivity is worse than RZ formats by about 1dBQ (linear part of Q power
dependence on Figure 4), which results in at least 1.3dBQ less nonlinear impairment for DPSK than for any
RZ format. The RZ33 advantage over NRZ is based on 1dBQ difference in linear properties in addition to
1dBQ difference in nonlinearity tolerance. Although CSRZ performs the same as RZ50, its nonlinear
penalties are slightly lower.
Nonlinearity tolerance of RZ type formats in 40Gb/s transmission depends on the intricacies of
adjacent pulse interaction. In general, both sXPM and sFWM intensify with increasing pulse overlap,
however sXPM is suppressed when the signal pulses are dispersed over many neighboring bits 7. In the
fibers with strong dispersion map this mechanism of sXPM suppression leaves sFWM as the leading
nonlinear impairment 9. Thus, shorter duty cycle formats have less pulse overlap in the non-dispersed state
when the pulses contain higher power and the interaction is stronger. Small overlap in the non-dispersed
state is especially important for sXPM since it attains its maximum when the overlap is partial. Shorter duty
cycle modulation formats also have shorter dispersion length, which leads to less average interaction time
in the non-dispersed form. As a result both sFWM and sXPM are reduced. Comparison of Figures 5b and
5c shows that less amplitude fluctuations, timing jitter, and ghost pulse generation were the reasons for
better performance of RZ33 compared to RZ50.
Some improvement in nonlinear tolerance is achieved for CSRZ where optical phase variation is
employed. Both amplitude jitter and ghost pulse generation for the intermittent phase signal were reduced
to RZ type formats (compare Figures 5a and 5b). It can be shown that variation of the optical phase

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 produces negative interference from some of the interacting pairs and triplets depending on the exact phase
distribution. In the case of CSRZ phase pattern the leading interaction terms (the closest neighbors)
interfere constructively but the next order terms reduce the interaction. Thus, CSRZ does not entirely
suppress sFWM but suffers less impact than RZ modulation formats.
The actual difference in the nonlinearity tolerance of CSRZ and RZ50 formats is marginal due to
the fact that the former format possesses the additional mechanism of sFWM reduction but has larger duty
cycle than the latter format. Nonlinear tolerance of RZ formats significantly surpasses NRZ, in which 100%
duty cycle leads to strong pulse overlap and therefore high levels of sXPM and sFWM. NRZ also suffers
from SPM due to comparable nonlinear and dispersion lengths.
DPSK requires higher launch power to achieve performance comparable to RZ due to smaller eye
opening. Eventually, DPSK transmission becomes limited by GVD-SPM effects. Indeed, phase encoding
introduces chirp due to the rising and falling edges of the NRZ signal, which interacts with dispersion and
as a result amplitude modulation is produced. The chirp is controlled by the rise time of the NRZ signal
generator at the transmitter. Shorter rise time creates stronger chirp, however, the amount of energy in the
high frequencies reduces. Figure 6 shows that increase in the rise time changes nonlinear penalties of
DPSK. Note that performance deteriorates significantly for longer rise time because of the additional linear
noise of rising and falling edges in the receiver interferometer.

5. Conclusions

In this paper we investigated the propagation properties of RZ33, RZ50, CSRZ, NRZ, and DPSK
in a 40Gbit/s, 1000km standard single mode fiber. We found that DPSK provides 0.3dBQ advantage in
performance over RZ33 in single channel propagation. In a WDM system with 0.4 spectral efficiency and
optimum power per channel (in our case 24dB OSNR) this advantage reaches 0.8dB because of the
difference in a linear cross-talk. In turn RZ33 tolerates 2dBm higher power per channel than NRZ and with
linear WDM penalties for 0.4 spectral efficiency taken into account it provides 1.5dB Q better
performance. Finally, we showed that in the optical link with dispersion control better than ±30ps/nm and
OSNR lower than 25dB, the differences in the dispersion penalties for NRZ, RZ50, RZ33, CSRZ, and
DPSK do not exceed 0.25dB Q.

6. Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank J. Conradi, G. Luther, and V. Kovanis for their help and encouragement.

7. References

1. G. P. Agarwal, "Nonlinear Fiber Optics", Academic Press (2001).

2. A. R. Chraplyvy and J. Stone, “Measurements of crossphase modulation in coherent wavelength-
division multiplexing using injector lasers”, Electron. Lett. , v 20, p 996 (1984).
3. J. Conradi, “Optical Fiber Communications IV”, Edited by I. Kaminov and T. Li, Academic Press
(2002).
4. D. Kovsh, E. A. Golovchenko, and A. N. Pilipetskii, “Enhancement in performance of long-haul
DWDM systems via optimization of the transmission format”, in Proc. OFC, Anaheim CA, WX2, p
361. (2001).
5. A. Hodzic, B. Konrad, and K. Petermann, "Alternative modulation formats in NX40 Gb/s WDM
standard fiber RZ-transmission systems" , J. Lightwave Technology, v 20, p. 598 (2002).
6. M. I. Hayee and A. E. Willner, “NRZ vs RZ in 10-40Gb/s dispersion-managed WDM transmission
systems”, IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett., v 11, p 991 (1999).
7. P.V. Mamyshev and N.A. Mamysheva, "Pulse-overlapped dispersion-manged data transmission and
intrachannel four-wave mixing", Opt. Lett, v 24, p. 454 (1999).

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 8. M. J. Ablowitz and T. Hirooka, "Resonant nonlinear intrachannel interactions in strongly dispersion-
managed transmission systems", Opt. Lett., v 25, p. 1750 (2000).
9. S. Kumar, J. C. Mauro, S. Raghavan and D. Q. Chowdhury, "Intra-channel nonlinear penalties in
dispersion managed systems" to be published in IEEE Photon. Tech. Lett (2002).

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 11.5

10.5

10LogQ, dB
9.5
nrz
8.5 csrz
rz33
7.5
rz50
6.5 dpsk

5.5
75 100 125 150 175 200 single
channel
Channel spacing, GHz

Figure 1: Spectral efficiency of MF in three channel 40Gb/s back-to-back simulations at 25dB OSNR

nrz
2 csrz
Penalty 10LogQ, dB

rz33
rz50
dpsk

0
-2 0 2 4
Power, dBm

Figure 2: Power dependence of linear cross-talk penalties in three-channel back-to-back WDM system at 0.4 spectral
efficiency.

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 3 3
nrz
nrz csrz
2.5 csrz
2.5
rz33
Penalty 10LogQ, dB

rz33

Penalty 10LogQ, dB
rz50 2 rz50
2 dpsk dpsk

1.5 1.5

1 1

0.5 0.5

0 0
-48 -32 -16 0 16 32 48
-48 -32 -16 0 16 32 48 -0.5
-0.5
Accumulated Dispersion, ps/nm Accumulated dispersion, ps/nm

a b
Figure 3: Dispersion tolerance of modulation formats in 40Gb/s transmission at (a) 25dB OSNR and (b) 20dB OSNR.

8
10LogQ, dB

6 nrz
csrz
5 rz33
rz50
4 dpsk
-2 0 2 4 6
Pow er, dBm

Figure 4: Nonlinear tolerance of modulation formats in the system of ten 100km spans of standard single mode fiber

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 Figure 5: Amplitude fluctuations, timing jitter, and ghost pulse generation for (a) CSRZ, (b) RZ50, and(c) RZ33 after
propagation in ten spans of 100km SMF. Launch power per channel is 3dBm.

7
10LogQ, dB

6.5

6
0.1 bit rise time
5.5 0.9 bit rise time

5
-2 -1 0 1

Power, dBm

Figure 6: DPSK performance change with the rising and falling time. The times are measured at the input of NRZ
signal modulator. Residual dispersion per channel is reduced from optimum to 60ps/nm to emphasize nonlinearity.

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