Accurate assessment of sensitivity and optimum threshold for semiconductor laser preamplified optical receivers

A recently developed moment generating function (MGF) characterisation for a laser preamplified optical receiver is employed to effect rigorous performance assessment in terms of sensitivity and decision threshold setting. A modified Chernoff bound (MCB) is used as the basis for error probability estimation and a comparison with the simple Gaussian approximation (GA) is effected. The GA is shown to predict accurately receiver sensitivity but to indicate inappropriately low decision threshold levels when signal-dependent noise is significant