Theoretical investigation of local oscillator intensity noise in optical homodyne systems

The degradation of system performance due to the intensity noise from a semiconductor local oscillator laser is theoretically investigated. A statistical model for the optical receiver is presented to calculate the bit error rate and the power penalty resulting from the local oscillator intensity noise. The power penalty depends critically on the noise power, data rate, and spectral characteristics of the noise. Simulation results are given for homodyne systems and compared to the results of Gaussian approximation.