Power penalty due to decision-time jitter in optical communication systems.

The effect of decision-time jitter on the performance of optical communication systems is evaluated theoretically assuming a receiver with a matched filter to give a raised-cosine waveform of the detected signal. The jitter-induced noise and the associated power penalty are calculated for the uniform and Gaussian distributions of the time jitter. The results suggest that the time jitter should be ~(4B)(-1) to keep the power penalty below 1dB for a lightwave system operating at the bit rate B.