Optical signal quality metric based on statistical moments and Laguerre expansion

A new and straightforward optical signal quality metric, which is based on the approximation of the analytical probability density function by its Laguerre expansion, is proposed. This expansion uses statistical moments to approximate the true statistics, but, unlike the well-known Gaussian approximation, higher order moments can be used as well. The quality of the proposed metric is discussed and the metric is compared with the Gaussian approximation. It is shown that the new metric provides not only a good estimation of the bit error rate in the range of practical interest but, contrary to the Gaussian approximation, correctly estimates optimum decision threshold and accurately pictures the shape of the noise distribution.