Multi Impairment Monitoring for Optical Networks

As optical networks become more complex, the need for in-line monitoring of more than just channel wavelength, power and OSNR becomes compelling. In this paper we describe an asynchronous delay tap sampling technique coupled with statistical machine learning that enables a single monitor to measure multiple simultaneous impairments on multiple formats. We demonstrate the technique for simultaneous measures of CD and 1st order PMD on a 40 Gbit/s NRZ-DPSK signal.