Evaluating the error probability in lightwave systems with chromatic dispersion, arbitrary pulse shape and pre- and postdetection filtering

A novel approach to analytically evaluate the bit error probability in optically preamplified direct-detection systems is presented, which can take into account the effects of pulse shaping, chirping, filtering at the transmitter and the receiver, both pre- and postdetection, chromatic dispersion, and ASE noise. The method is computationally very fast in that the saddle point integration method for solving the resulting line integral of a particular moment generating function is adopted. A closed-form approximation for the bit error probability is also provided, which is within 0.01 dB from the exact numerical results.