Use of the Kramers–Kronig receiver with a low-cost dual-drive Mach–Zehnder transmitter

We study the combination of a Kramers-Kronig (KK) receiver with a reduced cost I/Q transmitter based on single-armed dual-drive Mach-Zehnder modulator. Our goal is to assess the benefits of KK reception over standard direct detection (SDD) in this combination. We show that in spite of the KK's ability to eliminate signal-signal-beat-noise, in the regime of low chromatic dispersion (CD) the SDD performance matches or outperforms it. We explain this phenomenon and show how it is related to the particular way in which the dual-drive Mach-Zehnder transmitter operates. The benefits of KK processing become clearly visible only when CD is the dominant distortion mechanism.