S. Benedetto et al., DIRECT-DETECTION OF OPTICAL DIGITAL TRANSMISSION BASED ON POLARIZATION SHIFT KEYING MODULATION, IEEE journal on selected areas in communications, 13(3), 1995, pp. 531-542
Receiver structures for the direct detection of binary and multilevel
digital optical modulation schemes employing the modulation of the sta
te of polarization of light, or POLarization Shift Keying (POLSK), are
proposed and accurately analyzed, in the presence of optical amplifie
r ASE noise and electrical receiver noise. A comprehensive set of resu
lts shows that the performance of the binary system is approximately 3
dB better than IM/DD (on peak optical power), and stays so for a wide
range of optical filter bandwidths. As a somewhat unexpected result,
the multilevel schemes show a lower sensitivity to the use of a wide o
ptical filter than the binary one. As a consequence, transmitting 3 b/
symbol on a cubic constellation on the Poincare sphere brings about vi
rtually no penalty, whereas transmitting 2 b/symbol has a better perfo
rmance than binary transmission, for even relatively low values of the
optical filter bandwidth. A clear explanation of this phenomenon has
been found. These results suggest that narrow-bandwidth and therefore
low-dispersion, multilevel, POLSK transmission could be performed with
no penalty. Together with the low excitation of nonlinear effects in
the fiber that polarization modulation seems to ensure, these results
make POLSK schemes look promising for very-long-haul transmission.