Eye Penalty due to Cross-phase Modulation (XPM) in a Single Segment WDM IM/DD Transmission System

We investigate the effect of Cross-Phase Modulation (XPM) in a single segment Intensity Modulation Direct Detection (IM/DD) Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) transmission system. Computer simulation is carried out to evaluate the XPM induced eye penalty due to the input channel power, channel spacing, fiber length, channel bit rate and number of channels. The results show that for 2 dB eye penalty, the maximum allowable fiber length is 35 km, 60 km and 75 km for a channel bit rate of 12.5 Gbit/s, 10 Gbit/s and 7.5 Gbit/s respectively. The effect of XPM in a single-segment configuration can effectively be reduced by increasing the channel spacing to more than 100 GHz.