40G DQPSK Optical Transmission Technology40G D.DOCVIP

40G QPSK and DQPSK Modulation By: Application Engineer Lian Zhao, Principal Engineer Hari Shankar, and Validation Test Engineer Ariel Nachum,Inphi Corporation ABSTRACT This paper discuss the theory behind differential phase shift keying (DPSK) and differential quadrature phase shift keying (DQPSK) modulation formats and explains in detail how to implement a DQPSK experimental set-up, using Inphi’s 2514DZ differential Mach-Zender (MZ) driver. 1 INTRODUCTION The on-going growing demand for greater capacity in optical communication systems, calls for an increase in transmission speed from 10 Gbps to 40 Gbps and beyond, while maintaining signal quality. Optical communication systems have predominantly used some form of on/off keying (OOK) as a modulation format, namely NRZ or RZ modulation. As data rates increase, the inefficiency of these modulation formats from a bandwidth point of view is becoming more apparent. With data rates moving to 40 Gbps and beyond, dispersion in the fiber limits the distance over which the data can be transmitted. Other impairments such as polarization mode dispersion or PMD become significant at 40 Gbps. Thus, inter-city transmission, which requires long-distance transmission of more than several hundred kilometers, has not been possible [1]. Transmission links are rapidly evolving from point-to-point links to interconnected optical networks. This requires the flexibility to pass multiple optical add-drop multiplexer (OADM) nodes along the transmission link. Today, most transmission systems have a 50 GHz WDM channel spacing, which implies a 0.8 bit/s/Hz spectral efficiency for 40 Gbps transmission [2]. For binary formats, duobinary and differential phase shift keying (DPSK) are close to the theoretical limit, which makes it difficult to cascade multiple OADMs along transmission link [6], [7]. The narrower optical spectrum of multi-level formats such as QPSK and differential quad phase shift keying (DQPSK) therefore ena