Mode partition noise caused by wavelength-dependent attenuation in lightwave systems

Abstract

Power fluctuations among the longitudinal modes of laser diodes cause noise in the received signal after being filtered by a wavelength-dependent attenuation mechanism. We have developed a theoretical model to characterise this noise and studied degradation in lightwave system performance. Power penalties observed in a 432 Mbit/s wavelength division multiplexing system experiment agreed with theoretical predictions.