Abstract

Optical switching techniques are beginning to play an important role in the evolution of future high bit rate transparent networks. It has been demonstrated experimentally that the power penalty performance of a variety of optical networks implementations significantly degrades due to the presence of phase-induced interferometric noise (PIIN) [1]. Specifically prototype optical crossconnects have been found to suffer from crosstalk induced interferometric noise [2]. Here a theoretical framework for the analysis of the causes and effects of PIIN is presented, together with a brief description of a software package that is able to determine the effect of this noise on the performance of optical networks. Results concerning the performance of a particular family of optical TDM architectures are given.

© 1997 Optical Society of America