Influence of transmission bit rate on performance of optical fibre communication systems with direct modulation of laser diodes

This paper reports on the influence of the transmission bit rate on the performance of optical fibre communication systems employing laser diodes subjected to high-speed direct modulation. The performance is evaluated in terms of the bit error rate (BER) and power penalty associated with increasing the transmission bit rate while keeping the transmission distance. The study is based on numerical analysis of the stochastic rate equations of the laser diode and takes into account noise mechanisms in the receiver. Correlation between BER and the Q-parameter of the received signal is presented. The relative contributions of the transmitter noise and the circuit and shot noises of the receiver to BER are quantified as functions of the transmission bit rate. The results show that the power penalty at BER = 10-9 required to keep the transmission distance increases moderately with the increase in the bit rate near 1 Gbps and at high bias currents. In this regime, the shot noise is the main contributor to BER. At higher bit rates and lower bias currents, the power penalty increases remarkably, which comes mainly from laser noise induced by the pseudorandom bit-pattern effect.