Performance Comparison of Duobinary Formats for 40-Gb/s and Mixed 10/40-Gb/s Long-Haul WDM Transmission on SSMF and LEAF Fibers

Duobinary formats are today considered as being one of the most promising cost-effective solutions for the deployment of 40-Gb/s technology on existing 10-Gb/s WDM long-haul transmission infrastructures. Various methods for generating duobinary formats have been developed in the past few years but to our knowledge their respective performances for 40-Gb/s WDM transmission have never been really compared. In this paper, we made an extensive numerical evaluation of the robustness of these different types of duobinary transmitter to accumulation of ASE noise, chromatic dispersion, PMD but also to single-channel and WDM 40-Gb/s transmission impairments on standard single-mode fiber. A numerical evaluation of the ability of duobinary format for mixed 10/40-Gb/s WDM long-haul transmission with 50-GHz channel spacing is also led, on both standard single-mode and LEAF fibers, and compared to DQPSK format. In order to clearly identify the limiting transmission effects on each of these two fiber types, the assessment of the performance of a 50-GHz spaced WDM 40-Gb/s long-haul transmission using either duobinary or DQPSK channels only is implemented at last.