A novel low power chromatic dispersion monitoring technique employing SOA spectral shift

A novel approach for online chromatic dispersion monitoring by use of the spectral shift in the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Power on the long-wavelength side of the signal through the SOA is extracted for measuring the dispersion characteristics. Keeping a constant input power of 0 dBm, the experimental result shows that the ratio of the filtered power to the total power decreased by 10 dB when the introduced dispersion reaches ±700 ps/nm.