Performance analysis of optically preamplified DC-coupled burst mode receivers

Bit error rate and threshold acquisition penalty evaluation is performed for an optically preamplified DC-coupled burst mode receiver using a moment generating function (MGF) description of the signal plus noise. The threshold itself is a random variable and is also described using an appropriate MGF. Chernoff bound (CB), modified Chernoff bound (MCB) and the saddle-point approximation (SPA) techniques make use of the MGF to provide the performance analyses. This represents the first time that these widely used approaches to receiver performance evaluation have been applied to an optically preamplified burst mode receiver and it is shown that they give threshold acquisition penalty results in good agreement with a prior existing approach, whilst having the facility to incorporate arbitrary receiver filtering, receiver thermal noise and non-ideal extinction ratio. A traditional Gaussian approximation (GA) is also calculated and comparison shows that it is clearly less accurate (it exceeds the upper bounds provided by CB and MCB) in the realistic cases examined. It is deduced, in common with the equivalent continuous mode analysis, that the MCB is the most sensible approach. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.