Solutions to Mitigate Cross-Phase Modulation Impairment in Coherent Fiber-Optic Communications

Abstract

In this thesis, methods of exploiting and consequently, mitigating the nonlinearities in Cross-Phase Modulation (XPM) dominated ber-optic communication is suggested using the model provided by Ciena Corporation. An enhanced Bit Error Rate (BER) per Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR) is obtained using the solutions provided in this work compared to the state of the art methods used in Ciena Corporation. Solutions include exploiting the properties of XPM in order to devise methods to detect the received data with less probability of error in optical communication and also to come up with new constellation designs, suitable for XPM-dominated optical channels. Coherent optical communication and specifically, phase-modulated optical communication has received much attention due to its higher spectral efficiency and also better receiver sensitivity. However, due to the optical Kerr effect, two major phase nonlinearities are added to the phase of the received signal at the end of an optical ber link called Self-Phase Modulation (SPM) and XPM. This thesis is focused on XPM dominated ber-optic links and tries to exploit the properties of XPM in order to obtain a better performance compared to the methods in which the cancellation of XPM noise is the main objective. Finally, a constellation design is discussed, considering the model we use in this thesis. Constellation design suitable for optical communication and in particular, XPM-dominated fiber-optic channels, has already been a topic of vast research, but the outcome of such efforts is highly dependant on the model used to produce XPM values. Thus, our work is unique in its own way.