We evaluate the performance of the externally modulated optical minimum shift keying (MSK) signal. The tolerance against fiber dispersion, linear crosstalk, self phase modulation (SPM), and stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) threshold for MSK is studied and compared with that of 50percent duty cycle return-to-zero differential phase shift keying (RZ-DPSK) and 50percent duty cycle RZ on-off-keying (RZ-OOK), via both experiment and simulation. Simulation results show that the MSK signal has the widest tolerance against SPM and the smallest linear crosstalk among these formats. Experimental results agree with the simulation on negative penalty against SPM tolerance and show widest tolerance against dispersion tolerance for MSK. The measured SBS threshold of both MSK and RZ-DPSK is more than 10 dB higher than that of an RZ-OOK system.
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