A SOA-based all-optical regeneration of DPSK signals for satellite application

A semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA)-based regenerative amplification (SORA) of differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) signals for satellite application is presented, which has a simple frame and a large regenerative capacity to the small-power signals. The key mechanism of SORA is the discriminative gain provided by the SOA for the marks and spaces colliding in it. Simulation shows that, by using the SORA, the Q-factor improvement of degraded DPSK signals is about 0.7 dB, but it is significantly influenced by both optical confinement factor and gain relaxation time. Considering the satellite vibration, the bit error rate (BER) for the case of SORA can improve more than one order of magnitude compared with the case of no SORA.