Optimal detection of solitons with timing jitter

When a soliton signal is detected by the maximum-likelihood principle, other than walk-out of the bit interval, timing jitter does not degrade the performance of the receiver. When the maximum-likelihood detector (MLD) is simulated by using the importance sampling method, even with a timing-jitter standard deviation the same as the full width at half-maximum of the soliton, the signal-to-noise (SNR) penalty is just about 0.2 dB. The MLD performs far better than the conventional scheme to lengthen the decision window with SNR degradation proportional to the increase of the window width. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America.