CALCULATION OF BIT-ERROR PROBABILITY FOR A LIGHTWAVE SYSTEM WITH OPTICAL AMPLIFIERS AND POSTDETECTION GAUSSIAN-NOISE

This paper is an extension of the analysis presented in a previous paper [1] which dealt with the bit-error probability of a lightwave communication system whose noise contribution was exclusively attributed to spontaneous emission noise of optical amplifiers. In addition, the earlier theory was based on a nonreturn to zero (NRZ) modulation format with zero signal power assigned to logical ZEROS. The present paper extends the earlier theory in several ways. Now, the optical pulses can be much shorter than the bit period (solitons), the power level of logical ZEROES need not vanish, and the thermal noise of the post-detection electronic circuit is taken into account.