The impact of a post-OTDM-demultiplexing optical filter on the performance of dense On-Off Keying (OOK) Optical Time Division Multiplexing (OTDM)-Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) systems is studied in this chapter. For Return-to-Zero (RZ) modulation, it was found that the additional filter working in a double-tier filter configuration did not offer any significant improvements to performance when the signal pulse width is optimized. Improvements generally increase only when the signal pulse width deviates from its optimal value and only for low spectral densities. For ideal Non-Return-to-Zero (NRZ) modulation, however, significant improvements of around 1 dB are obtained using the double-tier configuration over a large range of spectral densities.
A technique to improve optical time division multiplexing - wavelength division multiplexing performance