Measurement of Optical Nonlinear Distortions and Their Uncertainties in Coherent Systems

In this paper, we propose an experimental setup and an uncertainty evaluation to feed our previously proposed semi-analytical model for brisk assessment (SAMBA) of distortions from fiber nonlinearities over heterogeneous fiber spans transmission. We experimentally characterize physical nonlinear parameters required by the SAMBA by setting up a one span test bed and cumulated chromatic dispersion emulation in the transmitter, resulting in a nonlinear noise coefficient curve. We determine the accuracy of our method through the evaluation of the uncertainties impacting the measurement of the nonlinear noise. Finally, we assess the accuracy of our SAMBA performance estimator with a multispan dispersion unmanaged transmission up to 25 spans and show less than 0.5 dB prediction error in the linear and nonlinear regimes.