Capacity and power budget of spectrally sliced WDM networks

摘要

In a previous paper,~1 we have shown that when an optical preamplifier is used in the receiver of a spectrum-sliced wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) system, there is an optimum channel bandwidth to bit rate ratio to minimize the required average number of photons per bit N-bar_p, and N-bar_p is more than 10 dB lower than that achievable with PIN receivers. The optimum bandwidth is a consequence of signal energy fluctuations dominating whtn the bandwidth is too low, and amplifier spontaneous-spontaneous beat noise dominating when the bandwidth is too large.