Distribution free bound on the performance of optical communication systems in the presence of jitter

For very high data rate optical communication systems, jitter is an impairment which may seriously degrade system performance. Assuming knowledge of the jitter statistics to be restricted to just the range and RMS value, the authors determine a new upper bound on the performance. For a certain class of signals, they derive a worst-case distribution (WCD) which consists of three Dirac impulses, located at the centre and at the extremes of the range. The usefulness of the WCD is demonstrated by means of examples which show that for many practical cases the new bound is tight. They show how the WCD may be combined with a modified Chernoff bound to obtain an overall upper bound on system performance which encompasses a comprehensive set of impairments including jitter