Noncoherent detection of coherent lightwave signals corrupted by phase noise

Waves are treated that modulate by either on-off keying (OOK) or binary frequency-shift keying (FSK) and are further impaired by additive Gaussian noise. Heterodyne detection of such a waveform produces an electronic bandpass signal, which, to ease demodulation in the presence of phase noise, is noncoherently demodulated to extract the baseband pulse stream. The treatment goes beyond previous bit error rate (BER) analyses of optical heterodyne receivers for OOK and FSK. First, there is full adherence to the standard (Brownian motion) model of phase noise. Also, the receiver structure is formulated in such a way that the probability density function of the receiver output samples can be accurately determined. This permits calculations of the additive noise and phase noise tolerable when achieving bit error rates as small as 10 ^-9. Finally, the study is comprehensive regarding the range of parameters explored. Filtering at an intermediate frequency (IF) alone, as well as IF filtering plus postdetection low-pass filtering, is considered. When the receiver parameters decision threshold (for OOK) and IF filter bandwidth are optimized, large amounts of phase noise can be accommodated with only minor increases in required signal-to-noise ratio. This is especially important when the bit rate is moderate compared to the laser linewidth