Analysis of a DPSK soliton transmission system

We present a closed form expression to analyse the error performance of a differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) digital modulation format in an optical soliton communication system. In the analysis we include the effect of Gordon-Haus jitter, which is mainly due to the amplified spontaneous emission noise of the amplifiers. Gordon-Haus jitter is found to be less significant when the bit period is 15 times greater than the jitter variance and becomes more significant when the signal-to-noise ratio is greater than 20 dB. Due to a good bit error rate (BER) performance (BER approximate to 10(-20) at SNR = 21 dB), the DPSK modulation format has a potential application for a high-bit-rate and low-noise soliton communication system. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.