Chromatic Dispersion Monitoring for NRZ-DPSK System Using Asynchronous Amplitude Histogram Evaluation

We propose and demonstrate a chromatic dispersion (CD) monitoring technique for a nonreturn-to-zero differential phase-shift keying (NRZ-DPSK) signal generated with a Mach-Zehnder modulator at 40 Gb/s by analyzing the waveform overshoot after transmission. Without demodulating the NRZ-DPSK signal, the CD up to 120 ps/nm is monitored experimentally via the amplitude of the overshoot. Furthermore, based on the asynchronous amplitude histogram (AAH) evaluation method, a novel histogram processing method, which is more convenient, is proposed and investigated. Experimental results show that the monitoring scheme for CD is independent of optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) within a certain range. This technique needs neither demodulating the signal nor extracting the synchronous clock, and it can be applied to high-order modulation formats at different bit rates.