Fundamental dispersion limit for spectrally bounded On-Off-Keying communication channels

TL;DR

This paper establishes the first fundamental dispersion limit for spectrally bounded On-Off-Keying optical channels, showing that the maximum achievable dispersion is constrained by a specific analytical bound.

Contribution

It introduces the first formulation of a fundamental dispersion limit for OOK channels, combining analytical derivation and numerical validation.

Findings

The dispersion limit is 1/π times β₂ L B².

Numerical simulations confirm the analytical limit.

Previous approximations underestimated the true limit.

Abstract

The fundamental dispersion limit for optical communication based the On-Off-Keying format is calculated. It is shown both analytically and with numerical simulations that an OOK optical sequence, which passes through spectrally narrow noncompensated dispersive channel cannot exceed the limit 1/{\pi} > {\beta_2} L B^2, where {\beta_2}, L and B are the dispersion coefficient, the fiber's length and the bit-rate respectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a fundamental limit was formulated. In the literature, only approximation evaluations were developed yielding much smaller limiting values.