OSNR Margin Assessment for Optical Transmissions in the Nonlinear Regime with Forward Error Correction
23 March 2003
: We study numerically and experimentally the OSNR margin of high-speed optical transmission systems in the nonlinear regime at FEC thresholds. It is found that the OSNR margin can be significantly larger than the Q margin, in contrast to ideal linear case. As a result, the FEC coding gains for transmissions in the nonlinear regime can also be larger than the commonly quoted values for the linear case. Ó2002 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (060.2330) Fiber optics communications, (060.4370) Nonlinear optics, fibers.