Performance analysis of NRZ, RZ, CRZ and CSRZ data formats in 10 Gb/s optical soliton transmission link under the impact of chirp and TOD

This paper presents the performance analysis of non-return-to-zero (NRZ), return-to-zero (RZ), chirped return-to-zero (CRZ) and carrier suppressed return-to-zero (CSRZ) data formats in optical soliton transmission link under the impact of chirp and third-order dispersion (TOD). The performance of these data formats has been analyzed on the basis of certain performance metrics, viz, bit error rate (BER), Q² (dB), OSNR, eye opening, etc. It has been reported here that the performance of CRZ and CSRZ modulation format is better as compared to NRZ and RZ in a soliton transmission link. Further, CSRZ modulation format has been found to deliver optimum performance on the basis of performance evaluation metrics reported in this paper. In case of NRZ and CSRZ, comparatively narrow power spectrum has been observed. Best eye opening, highest value of Q² (dB) of 18 dB and lowest value of BER of the order of 10⁻¹⁶ has been reported in case of CSRZ among the considered data formats. The results have been obtained by varying noise figure from 3.0 to 9.0. No considerable effect of noise was observed. It was observed that at very narrow and ultra short pulse width, OSNR value suffers heavily and reduced to even negative values in dB, thus inducing a high degree of OSNR power penalty. The results were obtained by varying chirp factor from −0.6 to +0.6. Negative chirp resulted in improved OSNR as compared to positive chirp. RZ data format yielded a broader optical spectrum, comparatively low spectral efficiency and poor OSNR thus it was found that RZ format is not suitable for optical soliton transmission under the impact of chirp and TOD.