Improvement of dispersion tolerance using wavelength-interleaving and forward error correction

In this paper, we first derived the BER expression of an optical channel with chromatic dispersion impairment. The derived BER expression takes into account the influence of pulse spreading, transmitter rise/fall times, receiver Q-factor and noises. It is simpler and hence easier to use than many existing channel BER models. Then we proposed a wavelength-interleaved FEC scheme to mitigate the chromatic dispersion impairment in optical transmission system and analyzed its decoding performance. The minimum wavelength separation required for such a wavelength-interleaving FEC system to obtain the highest coding gain is also determined. Based on this design, the chromatic dispersion tolerance of the proposed system with 2-wavelength and 4-wavelength-interleaving are shown to improve by about 13% and 22%, respectively, over a non-interleaved system. In essence, wavelength-interleaving averages out the performances of a set of channels experiencing higher and lower dispersion, hence the interleaved channels have better performance than the non-interleaved channels experiencing higher dispersion, and worse performance than the non-interleaved channels experiencing lower dispersion. However, since WDM systems are typically designed based on the worst-case channel, the overall system performance is improved by wavelength-interleaving.