Abstract

A WDM network composed of optical amplifiers and optical cross connects is always affected by cross talk and ASE in addition to other causes of performance degradation (laser noise, receiver shot and thermal noise, fiber dispersion, transmitter and receiver bandwidth limitations, etc.) Because it is nonlinearly transformed by the photodetector, ASE affects the performance of an optical system quite differently from other types of noise.¹ Moreover, in WDM networks, various kinds of cross-talk interferences (interband and coherent and noncoherent intraband) contribute to signal degradation.² In this context, a separate analysis of the phenomena and the superposition a posteriori of their effects proves inadequate. We propose a more general strategy of simulation, in which the effects of interferences and noise are taken into account simultaneously. The method combines a Monte Carlo approach for estimating the effect of all the interferences (ISI and cross talk), whose statistics can be reasonably described by relatively short simulated sequences, with an analytical approach for evaluating the effect of noise.

© 1995 Optical Society of America