Impact of modulation frequency on cross-phase modulation effect in intensity modulation-direct detection WDM systems

The impact of modulation frequency on the crossphase modulation (XPM) effect in intensity modulation (IM)-direct detection wavelength-division multiplexing systems is investigated theoretically and numerically. A simple expression for IM is derived, verified by simulation and its validity is presented. The dependence of XPM-induced IM on the fiber length, fiber dispersion, channel separation and pump modulation frequency is assessed. It is shown that at very low frequency the walkoff effect has almost no influence on the XPM-induced IM efficiency which increases with the square of the frequency; at higher frequency the IM efficiency can be reduced significantly by the walkoff and scales linearly with modulation frequency.