Reduction of Excess Intensity Noise in Spectrum-Sliced Incoherent Light for WDM Applications

We investigate wideband reduction of excess intensity noise in incoherent light for application to spectrum-sliced WDM systems. The noise reduction scheme is based on optoelectronic feedforward compensation. We derive expressions for the probability density function of noise-reduced incoherent light and present measurements that are in good agreement with theory. We evaluate the significant levels of improvement obtainable in the capacity of spectrum-sliced WDM channels. For example, to obtain a signal-to-noise ratio of 50, a noise-reduced channel requires six times less optical bandwidth than a spectral slice without noise reduction.