A staggered differential phase-shift keying modulation format for 100Gbit/s applications.

We propose and demonstrate by numerical simulation a new phase modulation format, the staggered differential phase-shift keying (SDPSK), for 100 Gbit/s applications. Non-return-to-zero (NRZ) SDPSK signals was generated by using two phase modulators, and return-to-zero (RZ) SDPSK signals with 50% duty cycle was generated by cascading a dual-arm Mach-Zehnder modulator. The demodulation of 2 bit/symbol can be simply achieved on 1 bit rate through only one Mach-Zehnder delay interferometer and a balanced receiver. By comparing the transmission characteristics of the two staggered phase modulation formats with those of NRZ-DPSK, RZ-DPSK, NRZ-DQPSK, and RZ-DQPSK, respectively, we show that, the SDPSK signal has similar chromatic dispersion and polarization-mode-dispersion tolerance to the DPSK signal with same NRZ or RZ shape, while the SDPSK signal has stronger nonlinear tolerance than the DPSK or DQPSK signal. In addition, the SDPSK signal has the best transmission performance when each signal was transmitted over 106km optical SMF+DCF, and then launched into a third-order Gaussian optical bandpass filter placed with beyond 125GHz bandwidth.