Tolerance of laser frequency offset in optical minimum-shift keying transmission systems

A mismatch between laser frequency and delay interferometer (DI) phase is found to be the most critical impairment for the receiver performance in a practical phase-modulated (PM) system. This paper investigates the receiver performance degradation caused by frequency offset between optical signal and DI in a 10 Gb/s minimum-shift keying (MSK) system, and compares it with the conventional PM formats, optical differential-phase-shift keying (DPSK) and differential-quadrature-phase-shift keying (DQPSK), which are nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) and 50% duty cycle return-to-zero (RZ). Results show that the MSK system is about double times and six times more robust to frequency offset than the DPSK and DQPSK systems operating at the same bit rate, respectively.