Monitoring Optical Network Performance Degradation Due to Amplifier Noise
01 January 2003
The relationship between optical performance as monitored within a network and the end terminal optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) and bit error rate (BER) is measured for the case of performance degradation due to amplified spontaneous emission noise. Measurements on 10 Gb/s signals reveal that performance monitoring sensitivity to OSNR levels of 26 dB is sufficient for identifying degradations that impact the end terminal BER.