Performance characterization of components with group delay fluctuations

A variety of components in optical communication systems exhibit group delay fluctuations, which degrade the quality of transmitted signals. In this letter, we present a method to derive two independent figures-of-merit, based on the measured group delay, which accurately determine the system performance degradation caused by any type of group delay fluctuations in a component. These two parameters can be used to estimate the performance of concatenated components and are, therefore, suited for component specifications.