Impact of laser linewidth on optical channel spacing requirements for multichannel FSK and ASK systems

Abstract
The sensitivity penalty is evaluated for amplitude-shift-keyed and frequency-shift-keyed multichannel coherent systems that use lasers with linewidths which are a significant fraction of the bit rate. The study was conducted for both ASK and FSK systems using a single-filter receiver with nonsynchronous detection. For FSK systems, both NRZ (nonreturn-to-zero) and alternate mark inversion (AMI) signal formats were studied. The optical channel spacing is strongly determined by the laser linewidth. For example, with the FSK-NRZ data rate of 150 Mb/s, the optical channel spacing which gives 1-dB crosstalk penalty is 4 GHz when the intermediate frequency linewidth is 50 MHz (laser linewidth is 25 MHz), as opposed to 1.8 GHz when the linewidth is negligible.