In-Band OSNR Measurement Method for All-Optical Regenerators in Optical Domain

Abstract

We propose an in-band measurement method of optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) output from an all-optical regeneration system with a nonlinear power transfer function (PTF) according to the fact that there are different average gains of signal and noise. For the all-optical quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) regenerator as an example, the output OSNR is derived from the input OSNR and the total gain of the degraded QPSK signal. Our simulation shows that the OSNR results obtained by this method are in agreement with those calculated from the error vector magnitude (EVM) formula. The method presented here has good applicability for different data rates but is also useful for analyzing the OSNR degradation of other nonlinear devices in optical communication links.