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2011
Book Article
Titel
Systems with higher-order modulation
Abstract
With the objective of reducing costs per information bit in optical communication networks, per fibre capacities and optical transparent transmission lengths have been stepped up by the introduction of new technology in recent years. The innovation of the erbium-doped fibre amplifier (EDFA) at the beginning of the nineties facilitated long distances to be bridged without electro-optical conversion. Wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) technology allowed a lot of wavelength channels to be simultaneously transmitted over one fibre and to be amplified by one EDFA with high bandwidth, offering a huge network capacity. At this time, the modulation format of choice was the simple ""on-off keying"" (OOK), and there was no need for increasing spectral efficiency. The internet traffic growth during the nineties required increasing transmission rates. In that context, the transmission impairments of the optical fibre had to be counteracted and the application of differential binary phased shift keying (DBPSK) became an issue, providing for a higher robustness against nonlinear effects [1]. Moreover, the transmission behaviour of binary intensity modulation was optimized by using alternative optical pulse shapes such as return to zero (RZ) and by employing schemes with auxiliary phase coding, such as optical duobinary, which exhibits a higher tolerance against chromatic dispersion (CD). The capacity-distance product was further enhanced by applying optical dispersion compensation, Raman amplification and advanced optical fibres, as well as through electronic means, such as forward error correction (FEC) and the adaptive compensation of CD and polarization mode dispersion (PMD).