Effect of phase noise on optical minimum-shift keying transmission systems

Phase-modulated (PM) signals have recently been used in long-haul lightwave communication systems to reach record distances. Added directly to the signal phase, linear and nonlinear phase noise cause performance degradation in PM systems. Minimum-shift keying (MSK), as a special format of PM signals, presents some different features of phase noise tolerance. This paper investigates the effect of phase noise on the performance degradation in the 10 Gb/s optical MSK systems and analyzes the contribution of phase noise to the bit error rate (BER), compared with the conventional PM format, 50% duty cycle optical return-to-zero differential phase-shift keying (RZ-DPSK) signals, in several typical local fiber dispersion transmission systems. The effect of intensity noise on the performance degradation in the corresponding transmission systems is also investigated.