Analysis of direct detection lightwave systems with optical amplifiers

Abstract

We provide a detailed analysis of direct detection lightwave systems employing an optical preamplifier at the receiver and derive the closed form expression for the bit error probability of WDM systems emvloying on-off keying (OOK) as modulation format. In our analysis, we consider various cases in which the receiver model uses either a finite-time integrator or Fabry-Perot filter operating in a sinfgle channel or multi-channel environment. We take into account the optical amplifier noise, the postdetection receiver noise, the shot noise, and the effect of the nonzero laser linewidth.