Optical Fiber Direct Detection Receivers Optimally Tolerant to Jitter

A technique for optimizing the performance of directdetection optical communication receivers for binary signaling in the presence of signal dependent noise, additive noise, and intersymbol interference by minimizing a Chernoff bound on the average error probability is extended to accommodate timing jitter. Receivers are identified which provide significantly improved performance compared to conventional designs, and the performance of a jitter-optimized receiver is shown to be relatively insensitive to variations in the jitter level.