Precompensation for Narrow Optical Filtering of 10-Gb/s Intensity Modulated Signals

Signals in spectrally efficient optical networks can be distorted by the narrowing of the overall bandwidth that occurs when optical add-drop multiplexers are concatenated. In this letter, it is demonstrated that the performance implications of this bandwidth narrowing can be mitigated by precompensation using arbitrary optical waveform generation. The synthesis of the required voltage waveforms for a dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator reduces the penalty in receiver sensitivity due to narrow optical filtering from 6.5 to 1.9 dB. Simultaneous precompensation for fiber dispersion is also demonstrated.