Digital Longitudinal Monitoring of Optical Fiber Communication Link

Optical transmission links are generally composed of optical fibers, amplifiers, and filters. In this paper, we present a channel reconstruction method (CRM) that extracts physical characteristics multiple link components such as longitudinal fiber losses, chromatic dispersion (CD), amplifiers’ gain spectra, filters’ responses, only from receiver-side (Rx) digital signal processing (DSP) data-carrying signals. The concept is to reconstruct virtual copy an actual in the domain, where fibers amplifiers modeled split-step Fourier for Manakov equation while filters emulated complex-valued finite impulse response We estimate model parameters CD, gains, filter responses boundary conditions, i.e., transmitted received Experimental results show that, unlike traditional analog testing devices time-domain reflectometers spectrum analyzers, CRM visualizes multi-span Rx DSP, thus localizes anomaly among ones without direct measurement.