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.