Power Penalty From Amplified Spontaneous Emission in Spatial Diversity Links for Fade Mitigation

Abstract

We investigate the power penalty caused by excess amplified spontaneous emission in an optically preamplified receiver for a communications link where a multiwavelength spatial diversity transmitter is used to mitigate atmospheric fading. We compare measured receiver sensitivity for a four-wavelength 10.7-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero on-off-keyed system to theory using both the Gaussian noise approximation and chi square statistics.