JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 11, NO.

12, DECEMBER 1993

2145

Theoretical Determination of Sensitivity Penalty for Burst Mode Fiber Optic Receivers
Charles A. Eldering
Abstract-Digital burst mode fiber optic receivers are being developed that establish the threshold for determination of a received 1 or 0 based on reception of the first few received 1s. Such receivers can provide a large dynamic range while allowing the use of a minimum burst preamble. However, a sensitivity penalty with respect to continuous mode receivers which establish an ideal threshold exists. In this article we show the origin of this penalty and show by numerical evaluation that, for systems in which the noise can be modeled as Gaussian, the penalty is exactly 3.00 dB when a single bit is used for establishing the threshold. This penalty decreases as the number of bits used to establish the threshold is increased, dropping to 0.51 dB when 8 bits are used as a preamble, and 0.28 dB when 16 bits are used.

is particularly important in telephony applications, where short bursts (e.g. 40 bits) containing a few voice samples are transmitted from the subscriber to the central office. In such applications it is not possible to build long bursts due to the delay which would be incurred waiting for additional voice samples. This delay results in an increase in the total network delay, which when combined with echo produced at the 2-wire to 4-wire conversion can lead to perceivable echo for the user.l,* It is thus necessary to develop receivers that can perform the task of amplitude recovery in a few bits. The requirements for components (transmitters and receivers) for TDh4A PON networks have been previously outlined [3] and devices are presently being developed for I. INTRODUCTION subscriber loop applications. Previously reported devices URST mode fiber optic receivers are presently being [4], [5] for burst mode reception have shown a large developed for a number of applications including dynamic range and performance up to 1 Gb/s. The funfiber optic networks based on Passive Optical Networks damental differences between traditional receivers and (PONs), and optical buses. Such networks typically use a these new burst mode devices are that D C or pseudo-DC Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) protocol, in which coupling (in which a DC restoration circuit is used in bursts of information are transmitted from the remote conjunction with an AC coupled circuit) must be used nodes to the central office (in the case of the PON) or throughout the receiver instead of AC coupling, due to from one node to another on the optical bus. The bursts the low frequency spectral content of the burst mode arrive to the receiver originating from various locations data,3 and that a rapid threshold generation circuit is used on the network and exhibit large differences in optical to establish the threshold for logical Is and Os,instead power. It is therefore necessary to have receivers which of a feedback AGC circuit with a time constant on the can adapt to the variations in power on a burst-to-burst order of several thousand bits, as is typically used in fiber basis. A large dynamic range is desirable in order to allow optic receivers. network flexibility; for PONs this permits variations in In this article we determine the penalty for burst mode the splitting ratio for two nodes connected to the central operation with respect to continuous mode operation for office while for optical buses it allows flexibility in the any receiver for which the Gaussian noise approximation number of optical taps placed on the bus. holds. This penalty arises from the fact that the first bit To realize burst mode reception, a preamble is nor- exhibits statistical variations in amplitude, and thus estabmally added to the beginning of each burst, consisting of a lishing the threshold based on this bit alone will result in guard field, (to allow some desynchronization of the busts a threshold voltage which shows identical statistical variawithout collisions) an amplitude recovery field which al- tions. The variations in the threshold voltage will result in lows the receiver to adapt to the received power in the a degradation in the BER as compared to continuous burst, and a clock recovery field. It is desirable to reduce mode systems which average (typically by low-pass filterthe length of this preamble to a minimum in order to ing) a large number of 1s to establish the threshold or maintain a high information transmission efficiency. This adjust the gain of one of the amplifier stages. We show that the exact penalty incurred in using a single bit for determination of the threshold as opposed to systems Manuscript received September 14, 1992. This work was performed while the author was with Alcatel SESA, which establish a perfect threshold is 3.00 dB. This penalty Spain. Author is presently with Jerrold Communications, General Indecreases as the number of bits used to establish the strument Corp., Hatboro, PA 19040. IEEE Log Number 9210191. threshold increases, and when the average of 36 bits are

0733-8724/93$03.00

0 1993 IEEE

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 11, NO. 12, DECEMBER 1993

used to establish the threshold the penalty is negligible, being less than 0.2 dB.
11. MODEL AND ASSUMPTIONS Fig. l(a) shows a traditional fiber optic receiver in which a preamplifier and automatic gain control circuit ( A G O is used in conjunction with a p-i-n photodiode. The preamplifier is AC coupled to a gain controlled amplifier (GCA), whose gain is controlled by a signal proportional to the low-pass filtered output. The resulting AGC circuit produces an eye diagram of constant amplitude, and a comparator with a fixed threshold level (V,) can be used to determine binary values from the eye diagram. Suitable low pass filtering for the data signal is included in the preamplifier to reduce noise. A an example of an idealized burst mode receiver is shown in Fig. l(b) and consists of a P-I-N and preamplifier which is DC coupled to a integrating sample and hold circuit which is used to determine the correct threshold (V,) based on the reception of a preamble which contains a field of n pulses representing 1s. As will be discussed, the exact type of preamplifier is not important for this analysis as long as the receiver performance is limited by additive white Gaussian noise. For this analysis we assume that the burst timing remains fixed, and that the timing shown in Fig. 2 can be used for the gated buffer and integrator reset control signals. The threshold voltage is determined by integrating the n pulses and scaling the result:

=#

PIN

PREAMPLIFIER

PIN

PREAMPLIFIER

*
;$FR

INTEGRATOR

SCALER

f +p+
0

vt

INTEGRATINGS/H

where y,, is the input voltage from the preamplifier (DATA IN) and T is the symbol duration. The constant K will depend on the pulse shape. If we consider pulses which may vary in amplitude from burst to burst but which all have the same pulse shape, the constant K will be given by

RESET

5
I
! . . . . .
~~~~~~

PEAKDETECTOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .~
~~~~

w
r
~

i ;

I
.1 ~
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . . .

where g ( t ) is the normalized pulse shape. The output of the circuit will be a voltage which is an estimate of the optimal threshold value, halfway between the level for a 1 and a 0. This assumes that the power received for a 0 is negligible with respect to that for a 1, although if that is not the case it would be possible to incorporate an offset in (2) to account for the non-zero level in the 0. The peak detector circuit shown in Fig. l(c) can be used as an approximation to the ideal integrating sample and hold of Fig. l(b) since by proper choice of the RC constant in the peak detector it is possible to make the charging time correspond to the n bits of the preamble. During charging the circuit acts as an approximate integrator, integrating the n pulses of the preamble and establishing the proper threshold through the use of a simple voltage divider at the output. This circuit has the advantage that no control (sampling) signal is necessary since once the capacitor is fully charged, subsequent Os

(d
Fig. 1. (a) Feedback AGC circuit based on gain controlled amplifier (GCA), (b) ideal feedforward burst mode receiver based on the use of an integrating sample and hold for the determination of the proper threshold and (c) simplified peak detector used as an approximation to the ideal burst mode feedforward circuit of (b).

will not discharge the capacitor due to the presence of the diode. The assumptions which have been used for the determination of the penalty for burst mode reception with respect to continuous mode reception in this analysis are: 1) each burst contains a noise corrupted n bit preamble consisting of a string of 1s which are used to establish the threshold V, which is used for determination of 1s and Os in the subsequent data stream. The n bits in the preamble are not considered to be

ELDERING: THEORETICAL DETERMINATION OF SENSITIVITY PENALTY

2147

bum 2
. b

DATA IN

diagram resulting in closure at the sampling point. In the following calculations, we assume that at the transmitter rectangular non-return-to-zero (NRZ) pulses are transmitted and that at the receiver a x/sinx amplitude equalizer and Nyquist brick-wall or raised cosine filtering is used. However, this assumption is made only for convenience and results in the minimum theoretical values of &,/No (at the receiver) for a given bit error rate. Since our comparison is between burst and continuous mode reception, the actual pulse shape and receive filter is not of consequence as long as the negligible IS1 condition is maintained. For real fiber optic systems in which minimum filtering at the receiver is performed, the actual values of Eb/N,, for a given BER would be higher than the values shown here, but the penalty for burst mode reception would be the same.
111. ANALYSIS

Fig. 2. Timing diagram for the ideal burst mode receiver shown in Fig. l(b). The signal DATA IN is the output from the p-i-n preamplifier.

data and are not considered in the calculation of the bit error rate (BER), 2 ) averaging of the n bits in the preamble can be used to reduce the error in V,, by using an ideal circuit to filter the noise in the preamble, resulting in an energy to noise power spectral density ratio of nEb/No, where Eb/Nois the energy to noise power spectral density ratio for any single bit in the preamble or data stream, and 3) receiver sensitivity is limited by additive white Gaussian noise, in which the noise statistics for the determination of a 1or a 0 are equal. This will apply to all types of PIN receivers (transimpedance, high impedance, or low impedance) and some types of APD receivers which are far from the sensitivity limit and limited by amplifier rather than detector noise. It should be noted that a number of different configurations for the burst mode receiver can be used. The authors of [4] use a differential input/output transimpedance amplifier with a peak detector forming the feedback loop. It is also possible to use a rapid AGC circuit in which the gain of one of the stages is adjusted based on the measurement of the amplitude of the n bits of the preamble. However, no circuit will be able to increase the energy to noise power spectral density ratio of the received preamble to greater than nEb/Nn. Because of this it is possible to calculate the minimum penalty for burst mode operation with respect to continuous mode operation, independent of the receiver type and exact circuit configuration. In addition, we note that the analysis presented here is independent of the bit rate and pulse shape, as long as the pulses are such that intersymbol interference (ISI) at the sampling point is negligible. This will remain valid at high bit rates, as long as the channel remains limited by Gaussian noise. and not bv severe distortion of the eve ,

The probability of error for binary systems is the probability of detection of a logical 1when a 0 was transmitted, plus the probability of detection of a logical 0 when a 1 was transmitted. For a fixed threshold system these quantities can be determined by the probability density functions of the received signal r when a 0 or 1 are transmitted, which are f ( r I 0) and f ( r I 1) respectively. P,(I I 0) and P,(O I 1) are

(3)

P,(O I 1) = / f ( r I 1) dr
-w

(4)

For many systems, the Gaussian distribution is valid for the descriptions of f ( r I 0) and f ( r I 11, which become

and

where U : is the variance of the power in the received signal (average noise power) and so and s1 are the transmitted power values for a 0 and 1 respectively. We assume normalized voltage levels in the following calculations. Graphical representation of f ( r I 0) and f ( r I l), assuming Gaussian distributions are shown in Fig. 3. In such cases, and when 0 and I are equiprobable, the probability of erI-or P, is

For fiber optic systems we can assume that an On-Off Keying (OOK) format is used, and that a good extinction

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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 11, NO. 12, DECEMBER 1993

4,

~:~~~
104 10-6

m
10-8
10-9 10.10 1

lolg

-.

10

12

14

16

18

EblNO

Fig. 3. Probability density functions f(r I O ) and f(r I l), and ideal threshold y , which has a probability density function which can be represented by a delta Dirac function located halfway between the mean received values for 0 and 1. The density functions are Gaussian and correspond to an E,/& of 12.6 dB. BER is given as the sum of the integrals of the tails of the distributions f(r I 0) and f(r I 1) from to V, and from --r to V,, respectively.

Fig. 4. BER versus E,,, assuming a fixed threshold and Gaussian distributions for f(r I 0) and f(r I l), and measured values from a PINFET, with the sensitivity (received power) corresponding to a BER of normalized to an E b / N o of 15.6 dB.

ratio (> 10 dB) is maintained in the transmitter. For equiprobable data, and with the threshold placed optimally (halfway between the voltage level for a 1 and the level for a 0) P, is

where U: = No, No being the noise power spectral density, and E, is the energy per bit. The function Q is Q ( z ) = ierfc ( z / fi) and the complementary error funcexp ( - A) dh. tion is defined as erfc(x) (2, Demonstration that PINFET transimpedance receivers which are far from the sensitivity limit can be modeled by a Gaussian process and described by (8) is shown in Fig. 4, where (8) is plotted along with experimentally determined values of PINFET sensitivity for a commercially available PINFET (Alcatel SEL Model 68-LDR, optimized for operation at 68 Mb/s). For convenience, the sensitivity values were normalized to the values of E,/N,, with E,/No = 15.6 dB corresponding to a sensitivity of -44.5 dBm at a BER of For burst mode operation the threshold voltage will be corrupted by noise, and the distribution of the values of the threshold voltages will be similar to that of the distribution of the values corresponding to logical 1s. This is represented in Fig. 5, where Gaussian distributions are assumed for 0, 1, and V,, assuming that only one bit is used to determine the threshold voltage. In the case that more than one bit is used to establish the threshold, the variance U: will decrease, and under ideal conditions will decrease as cri/n, where n , is the number of bits used to establish the threshold. For the general case of n bits the distribution of the threshold voltages will be given by

Fig. 5. Probability density functions f(r I 0) and f(r I l), and probability density function for the threshold V,, when calculated from the first 1 received. The threshold voltage has the same probability density function as f ( r I 1) with the mean located at the ideal value of V,. The density functions are Gaussian and correspond to an E,/N, of 12.6 dB.

probability of error will be given by

In burst mode systems, the BER can be expected to vary from burst-to-burst, depending on the accuracy with which the threshold value has been determined. The expected value of the BER, denoted Pe(BURST), is

f ( v )= - - exp a, 2%-

1 -+tlj
2 U:

(9)

When the threshold has a non-optimal value, the total

This assumes that f ( v )is ergodic, and thus the average burst-mode BER can be calculated from a sufficiently large number of bursts and is independent of the burst length. Numerical evaluation of (11) was performed assuming a Gaussian distribution for f ( V , ) , and breaking the integral into increasingly smaller regions near the peak, with the smallest division being a0/2. The results of the calculation are shown in Fig. 6, where it can be seen that the penalty incurred by determining the threshold based on reception of the first bit is 3.00 dB. This value was found to be constant over the BER range of to lo-. Fig. 7 shows the penalty as a function of the number of bits

ELDERING: THEORETICAL DETERMINATION OF SENSITIVITY PENALTY

2149

10-s
10.10

U
2
4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18 20

Eb/No

Fig. 6 . BER versus E,,, for continuous mode operation, where the threshold is assumed to be determined without error, and for burst mode operation when the threshold is determined from the first 1 received. The penalty for burst mode operation in these conditions is 3.00 dB.

21

and the 1and 0 levels, will be reduced; the fact that a 3.00 dB penalty corresponds to a reduction of the opening to one half of its value for continuous mode reception with an ideal threshold makes intuitive sense. We note that the authors of [5] report a 3.00 dB burst mode penalty for their APD receiver, but show that the penalty is due to threshold offset, not threshold variations as discussed in this article. The threshold offset is intentional, and serves to prevent random noise present in the preamplifier from being detected as data when there is no optical signal present. The results of this study suggest that even if this threshold offset were reduced, an inherent burst mode penalty would be present, thus the use of an offset for noise suppression with no optical signal present has little impact on their final receiver sensitivity. The exact penalty for burst mode operation with no threshold offset could be calculated using the method described in this article and a noise model6 appropriate for the high sensitivity APD receiver. V. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The author would like to thank the reviewers of this article for their careful study and helpful comments. M. M. Mamblona and R. M. G6mez are acknowledged for helpful discussions.

10

12

14

16

n (number of bits in preamble)

Fig. 7. Penalty for burst mode operation as a function of the number of bits in the preamble used to establish the threshold.

REFERENCES
used to establish the threshold, which drops from 3.00 dB when a single bit is used to establish the threshold to 0.94 dB when 4 bits are used, 0.51 when 8 bits are used and 0.28 when 16 bits are used. With 36 bits in the preamble for amplitude recovery the penalty is less than 0.2 dB. IV. CONCLUSIONS In conclusion, we note that burst mode receivers which utilize a single bit for threshold determination offer the possibility of a large dynamic range with a minimum burst preamble, but will incur a 3.00 dB penalty with respect to continuous mode receivers which establish a near ideal threshold by averaging a large number of received 1s. By increasing the number of bits in the preamble used for amplitude recovery the penalty for burst mode operation can be reduced substantially. Further physical insight into the 3.00 dB penalty incurred when using a single bit to determine the threshold can be gained by considering the eye diagram with superimposed threshold, in noisy conditions, for the case of continuous mode reception (ideal threshold level) and for burst mode reception. For continuous reception the ideal threshold can be viewed as a narrow line centered between the traces for a 1and a O, which have an observable width due to the noise in the signal. For burst mode reception, the threshold is no longer a narrow line but becomes a wide trace, with the width depending on the number of bits used to establish the threshold. With a single bit used to establish the threshold the width of the threshold is identical to the width of the levels for a 1 or 0. The effective eye opening, considered as the distance between the threshold
CCIIT Recommendation G.131, Stability and Echo, Fascicle

111.1, pp. 143-155, 1988. CCITI Recommendation G.114, Mean One-way Propagation Time, Fascicle 111.1, pp. 84-94, 1988. C. A. Eldering et. al, Transmitter and receiver requirements for TDMA passive optical networks, Proc. Third ZEEE Conf. Local Optical Networks September 24-25, 1991, (Tokyo, Japan). Y. Ota and R. G. Swartz, Burst-mode compatible optical receiver with a large dynamic range, J . Lightwave Technol., vol. 8, no. 12, pp. 1897-1903, December 1990. Y . Ota, R. G. Swartz, and V. D. Archer, DC-lGb/s Burst-Mode Compatible Receiver for Optical Bus Applications, J . Lightwave Technol., vol. 10, no. 2, pp. 244-249, February 1992. S. Personick, P. Balban, J. H. Bobsin, and P. R. Kumar, A detailed comparison of four approaches to the calculation of the sensitivity of optical fiber system receivers, ZEEE Trans. Cornnun., vol. 25, pp. 541-548, May 1977.

Charles A. Eldering received the B.S. degree in Physics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1981, the M.S. degree in Solid State Science and Engineering from Syracuse University in 1985, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of California at Davis in 1989. During 1981 to 1985 Dr. Eldering served as an officer in the U.S. Air Force Rome Laboratory where he developed electron and optical beam test methods for internal node testing of integrated circuits. From 1985 to 1990 he performed research at the UnGersity of California in the area of optidally nonlinear polymer materials and developed novel etalon structures for the characterization of new materials and for use as modulators in optically interconnected computing systems. From 1990 to 1993 he was with Alcatel SESA, Madrid, Spain, where he developed point-to-multipoint fiber optic systems for subscriber loop applications. At present he is with the Jerrold Communications Division of the General Instrument Corporation, working on hybrid fiber/coax systems for telephony. Dr. Eldering is a member of the IEEE, OSA, and SPIE.