Performance Comparison Between All-Pass and IQ Optical Modulation

We report a reduced complexity single polarization all-pass modulation scheme that uses overlap and discard to implement continuous transmission. We find that transmitter NSRs of −25 dB and −21 dB can be achieved with 1/3 and 1/6 the complexity, respectively, of reported solutions. We compare this modulation scheme with a conventional Mach-Zehnder modulator solution by measures of throughput, spectral efficiency, DSP and hardware complexity as well as back-to-back modem margin.