Investigations of high-speed optical transmission systems employing Absolute Added Correlative Coding (AACC)

• A novel multilevel intensity modulation format (AACC) is proposed.
• The transceiver structure and working principle of AACC are modelled and evaluated.
• AACC exhibits a superior performance in comparison to 4-PAM.

A novel multilevel modulation format based on partial-response signaling called Absolute Added Correlative Coding (AACC) is proposed and numerically demonstrated for high-speed fiber-optic communication systems. A bit error rate (BER) estimation model for the proposed multilevel format has also been developed. The performance of AACC is examined and compared against other prevailing On–Off-Keying and multilevel modulation formats e.g. non-return-to-zero (NRZ), 50% return-to-zero (RZ), 67% carrier-suppressed return-to-zero (CS-RZ), duobinary and four-level pulse-amplitude modulation (4-PAM) in terms of receiver sensitivity, spectral efficiency and dispersion tolerance. Calculated receiver sensitivity at a BER of 10−9 and chromatic dispersion tolerance of the proposed system are ∼−28.3 dBm and ∼336 ps/nm, respectively. The performance of AACC is delineated to be improved by 7.8 dB in terms of receiver sensitivity compared to 4-PAM in back-to-back scenario. The comparison results also show a clear advantage of AACC in achieving longer fiber transmission distance due to the higher dispersion tolerance in optical access networks.