Impact of Apodisation Slope Asymmetry in Linearly Chirped Dispersion

Compensating Fiber Bragg Grating

D. Aneesh*, A. Vishnu Vardhanan and R.Gangopadhyay
Department of Electronics and Electrical Communication Engineering,
IIT Kharagpur, West Bengal, India -721302

ABSTRACT

Chirped fiber Bragg grating (FBG) provides an attractive solution for low cost dispersion compensation in a fiber optic
transmission system. The present work carries out a study on the impact of asymmetry in the apodisation profile in linear
chirped fiber Bragg grating compensator in high bit rate optical transmission systems. It is shown that asymmetric tanh
apodisation with asymmetric factor k=0.8 performs better than the symmetric tanh apodisation (k=0.5).

Key words: Chirped fiber Bragg grating (FBG), apodisation, dispersion compensation, eye-opening penalty.

1. INTRODUCTION

The demand for high bandwidth in a modern communication network can be well met by use of optical transmission at high
bit rates. The optical transmission in a single mode fiber at high bit rate is mainly affected by group velocity dispersion
(GVD), self phase modulation (SPM) and cross phase modulation (XPM). For long distance communication it is necessary
to compensate dispersion periodically for applications at 10 Gbps and 40 Gbps. Linearly chirped fiber grating provides an
easy solution for the compensation of GVD in future optical networks because of its low cost, simplicity and wideband
characteristics.

The performance of a CFBG as a dispersion compensator depends on appropriate choice of several parameters such as ac
modulation index, grating length, chirp bandwidth apodisation profile etc 1, 2, 3. In particular, the apodisation profile plays a
vital role in providing the desirable characteristics of the reflectivity spectrum and the time delay ripple characteristics within
the compensating bandwidth of the grating. Several apodisation profiles such as sinc, sine, tanh etc have been suggested in
the literature2. However studies reveal2, 4 that the symmetric tanh apodisation profile performs best among the other
suggested apodisation profiles.

In this paper the impact of the apodisation asymmetry on dispersion compensating FBG at higher bit rates like 10Gbps and
40Gbps has been studied in terms of the average time delay ripple in the compensating bandwidth and the eye opening
penalty (EOP) by numerical simulations. Asymmetry is introduced by varying the position of the peak refractive index in the
apodisation profile and the slope of the profile at front and rear ends in the tanh profile, keeping the physical length of the
grating constant and ensuring a peak reflectivity of 99.5% or more.

*d_aneesh@yahoo.com; a.vishnu@gmail.com; ranjan@ece.iitkgp.ernet.in; phone +91-3222-283520; fax +91-3222-755303

 2. LINEARLY CHIRPED DISPERSION COMPENSATING FIBER BRAGG GRATING

A number of parameters are involved in the design of a fiber Bragg grating. The design of chirped FBG for dispersion
compensation requires proper choice of various grating related parameters. The following steps are involved in the design.

1) Calculate the grating length as

⎛ λ2 ⎞
L g = L f BD⎜⎜ ⎟⎟ ………………………………………………… (1)
⎝ 2n ⎠
Lf is the length of the fiber, D is the fiber dispersion parameter (ps/nm/km), B is the chirped bandwidth, λ is the central
wavelength and n is the effective refractive index.

2) For a given length Lg the number of uniform sections is chosen to be 60 or higher. The grating simulation is carried out by
transfer matrix approach 6 for an adequately chosen value of the chirp bandwidth, neff=1.45, ac modulation index at optimized
value 1.2x10 -4 and appropriate apodisation profile (tanh) to maintain a desired accuracy and the performance targets.

3) Chirp bandwidth is selected as the bandwidth containing the 98% of the energy in the signal spectrum.

3. ASYMMETRIC APODISATION PROFILES

In normal apodisation the refractive index variation is gradually increased from the front end reaching a peak at the centre of
the grating and decreased at the rear end. This in turn results in the suppression of sidelobes in the reflectivity spectrum. A
number of apodisation profiles such as Blackman, Gauss, sinc etc. has been used for the linearization of dispersion
characteristics. It has been found 4 that for minimizing the group delay ripple and the EOP, a symmetric tanh (with a=4)
performs the best. In order to analyze the impact of asymmetry in the apodisation profile, the symmetric profile can be
appropriately modified to provide asymmetry, by introducing different slopes at the front and rear ends of the grating. The
normalized asymmetric tanh apodisation can be described as
⎧ ⎡ 2az ⎤
⎪tanh ⎢ L ⎥,0 ≤ z ≤ kL
⎪ ⎣ ⎦ (1)
f (x ) = ⎨
⎪tanh ⎡ 2b(L − z ) ⎤, kL ≤ z ≤ L
⎪⎩ ⎢⎣ L ⎥⎦

where k is the asymmetric apodisation factor and a and b are the slope determining factors. The three parameters a, b and k
can be varied to implement a desired specific apodisation profiles corresponding to different values of k, a and b. Fig .1
shows the different asymmetric apodisation profiles. The physical length of the grating is kept constant for all the profiles.

4. SIMULATION RESULTS

Simulation is carried out by sending an intensity modulated NRZ signal and compensating the received signal by the CFBG.
In the simulation, a PN sequence of length 26-1 is generated to produce a NRZ modulated signal from a Mach Zahnder
modulator. The output from the Mach Zahnder modulator is coupled to a single mode fiber. The received output signal after
dispersion compensation is filtered by an optical Bessel filter and after photo detection is filtered by an electrical low pass
filter. The split step Fourier method is used to simulate the signal propagation through the fiber and the transfer matrix
method 6 is used for the signal propagation through the grating. The electrical low pass signal is used for the eye opening
measurement.

The impact of the asymmetry is analyzed in terms of the eye opening penalty at the receiver and the average time delay
ripple. The average time delay ripple is the mean value of the absolute difference of the actual time delay and the best fitted
straight line approximation to the delay profile. The parameters which are used for the FBG realization are given in Table 1.

Table 1. Designed Chirped Fiber Bragg grating parameters

FBG Parameters For 10Gbps transmission For 40Gbps transmission
Chirp Bandwidth 0.2nm 1.6 nm
Grating length 10cm 20cm
Operating wavelength 1550nm 1550nm
Ac modulation 0.7x10 -4 1.2x10 -4
DC modulation 0 0

1 25
EOP
0.9
Avg.time delay

A v erag e tim e d elay rip p le (p s)

0.8 20

0.7
0.6 15
E O P (d B )

0.5
0.4 10

0.3
0.2 5

0.1
0 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Apodisation asymmtery(k)

Fig. 1 Asymmetric apodisation profiles Fig.2. EOP and average time delay ripple versus
apodisation asymmetry for NRZ with optimized slopes
for 40 Gbps

The performance evaluation of the linearly CFBG as a dispersion compensator with tanh asymmetric slope apodisation has
been carried out by simulation. Figures 2 and 3 show the EOP and time delay ripple versus the asymmetric apodisation factor
k for NRZ signal at 40 Gbps and 10Gbps transmission system respectively with an appropriate variation of the slope of the
apodisation profile. It can be observed from the Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 that EOP and average delay ripple reduces to a very small
value when k is high i.e when the peak of the apodisation profile is shifted towards the rear end of the grating with a
corresponding lower slope in the front end of the grating. The decreased value of the average delay ripple in the passband of
the filter results in a reduced eye opening penalty for an apodisation with a=2, b=7 and k=0.8. Fig. 4 shows the variation of
EOP versus the span length of an 80Km optical link compensated with linearly CFBG. The CFBG used is optimized for for a
span length of 80 Km.

1.8 100 4
EOP Tanh (k=0.5; a=4; b=4)
1.6 90
Average delay

A v e ra g e tim e d e la y rip p le (p s)
Tanh (k=0.8; a=2; b=7)
1.4 80
3
70
1.2
60

EOP (dB)
E O P (d B )

1
50 2
0.8
40
0.6
30
1
0.4 20
0.2 10
0 0 0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1 70 75 80 85 90
Apodisation asymmetry(k) Length in Km

Fig 3. EOP and time delay ripple against the apodisation Fig .4. EOP versus length for 40Gbps case with asymmetry
asymmetry with optimized slopes for 10Gbps

5. CONCLUSIONS

The use of appropriate refractive index apodisation profile along the length of the FBG yields desirable characteristics in the
reflection spectrum and delay ripple characteristics across the filter passband. Although the symmetric tanh apodisation
provides the best performance when compared to other apodisation profiles, the present study shows that further
improvement in the grating characteristics can be achieved by the asymmetric apodisation. For the 80Km span length the
asymmetric apodisation (k=0.8, a=2, b=7) shows better performance compared to the symmetric apodisation (k=0.5,a=4,b=4).

REFERENCES

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