Transmission performance of high bit rate spectrum-sliced WDM systems

Abstract

We simulate transmission of a spectrum-sliced WDM channel operating at high bit rates (e.g., 622 to 2488 Mb/s). We calculate the bit error rate using the non-Gaussian statistics of thermal light sources that are commonly used in spectrum slicing and account for the effects of fiber dispersion. We evaluate the tradeoff in optical slice lint-width between signal-to-excess optical noise ratio and dispersion penalty in spectrum-sliced WDM systems, and determine the channel slicewidth that minimizes transmission penalty for a given link length and bit rate. We compare our simulations against the measured performance of a 1244 Mb/s channel over 20 km of fiber. The results in this paper provide useful information for the design of spectrum-sliced WDM networks.