Determination of the optimum electrical bandwidth for spectral slicing

The implementation of wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) in communication access networks is dependent upon the availability of low cost optical sources. One possible alternative to lasers is to employ slices of a broadband optical source obtained via optical filters, which may be tuneable. This paper considers the behaviour of such a spectrally sliced optical transmission system as a function of the bandwidth of a realistic receiver electrical filter for the first time. The treatment includes distortion from optical fibre dispersion over several kilometres of fibre. The optimum ratio between the electrical bandwidth and the optical bit rate is found to be ~0.6 for a fifth-order Bessel filter