Electrical filtering strategies to compensate waveform distortion in optically amplified IM/DD systems

Postdetection filtering strategies are investigated as a means of compensating the waveform distortion caused by the combined effect of chromatic dispersion and self-phase-modulation in intensity modulated, direct detection (IM/DD) systems. A design technique based on realisable filter models and a rigorous performance evaluation is introduced. In addition, a method of finding the theoretical optimum filter is given, providing a measure of the achievable system performance and the efficacy of the various filtering strategies. It is shown that the optimised postdetection filtering is effective in reducing the system power penalty, and the relative merits of different filters are quantified. The optimised filters are also shown to be tolerant to various system impairments. Such as noise, timing jitter and perturbation of filter parameters