Performance analysis of an optical TDM transmission link considering fiber dispersion and demultiplexer crosstalk

Abstract

This paper outlines the performance evaluation of high speed optical time division multiplexed (OTDM) system considering the effect of fiber dispersion and the impairments of nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) used as a demultiplexer. The system performance gets deteriorated by the channel crosstalk and the relative intensity noise (RIN) of the NOLM. Our investigation demonstrates that the system is penalized in terms of power penalty significantly when the intrinsic crosstalk becomes higher than −25 dB. The power coupling ratio must be within the range of 0.47–0.53 in order to maintain the intrinsic crosstalk within −25 dB level. Our analysis also indicates that the system suffers more power penalty with the increasing number of demultiplexing channel and the amount of pulse walk-off between signal and control pulse. Apart from channel crosstalk the system performance is also investigated taking into account the effect of intensity fluctuation of the demultiplexed signal which is called RIN of the NOLM. The system suffers from significant power penalty for the value of such noise higher than 10−5. It is also reported that the power penalty is significant when the chromatic dispersion index becomes higher than 0.30.