Analysis methods for optical heterodyne DPSK receivers corrupted by laser phase noise

Two methods are presented for analyzing the effects of phase noise on the performance of an optical heterodyne binary differential-(DPSK) system. The first method utilizes a perturbation solution for filtered phase noise. By comparing the results of this analysis with simulated results, it is shown that the perturbation solution is accurate for laser linewidths up to at least 10% of the bit rate. Using this analysis, the accuracy of the widely used approximation, whereby the effects of filtering on the magnitude of the phase-noise corrupted signal are neglected, is verified. The author´s second method is based on moments of random variables. As the level of phase noise in a practical DPSK system must be small, an improved formulation for the moments of the filtered phase noise is derived. It removes the major cause of this numerical instability. A maximum-entropy probability density function estimation technique is applied to the problem of analyzing the performance of a DPSK receiver. By comparing results with those obtained using the perturbation analysis, it is found that the moment-based method is effectively limited to relatively large error probabilities