Influence of guard band on performance of absolute polar duty cycle division multiplexing over a single wavelength and wavelength division multiplexing system

For the first time to the best of our knowledge the effect of guard band (GB) on the performance of 40 Gb/s Absolute Polar Duty Cycle Division Multiplexing (AP-DCDM) over a single wavelength and wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) are investigated and reported. It is demonstrated that the spectral width occupied by 40 Gb/s AP-DCDM with GB is 100 GHz (with minimum spectral efficiency of 0.4 b/s/Hz) whereas, this value can be reduced to around 80 GHz for AP-DCDM without GB (with minimum spectral efficiency of 0.5 b/s/Hz). In addition to better spectral efficiency, this amount of saving in the spectral width leads to ∼60 ps/nm improvement in chromatic dispersion tolerance. In this paper, characteristics of AP-DCDM with and without GB over WDM system are compared at the speed of 40 Gbit/s per WDM channel, for the tolerance to narrow optical filtering and minimum allowed channel spacing. The AP-DCDM without GB has narrower spectral width than AP-DCDM with GB, which makes its implementation in WDM system advantageous.