Power penalty due to decision-time jitter in optical communication systems

Abstract

The effect of decision-time jitter on the performance of optical communication systems is evaluated theoretically. The jitter-induced noise and the associated power penalty are calculated for the uniform and Gaussian distributions of the time jitter. The results suggest that the time jitter should be ≲(4B)−1 to keep the power penalty below 1 dB for a light-wave system operating at a bit rate B.