Measurement of Optical Nonlinear Distortions and their Uncertainties in Coherent Systems

In this paper, we propose an experimental setup and an uncertainty evaluation to validate our previously proposed semi-analytical model for the assessment of distortions from fiber nonlinearities over heterogeneous fiber spans transmission. We characterize experimentally physical nonlinear parameters required by the model 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 nonlinear noise measurement depending on the test bed operating point and the impact of the uncertainty on our estimator. Last, we assess the accuracy of our performance estimator with a multi-span dispersion unmanaged transmission up to 25 spans and show less than 0.5~dB prediction error in the linear and nonlinear regimes.