Bit-rate adaptive optical performance monitoring method for fiber communication systems

A novel bit-rate adaptive method, by varying the optical sampling rates alternatively, is proposed in this paper for optical performance monitoring. Firstly, the theoretical model and the differential software-synchronized algorithm are developed. Then, the results verify that different channel bit-rate can be estimated with high precision irrespective of the modulation formats and signal distortion caused by chromatic dispersion and nonlinearity along the fiber link. Employing the proposed bit-rate adaptive method, the eye diagrams and Q values of 10 Gbit/s, 40 Gbit/s and even higher bit-rate signal can be monitored by a single optical performance monitoring system without any prior knowledge about bit-rate or signal period. The method we propose in this paper has the advantage that different channel bit-rates can be adaptively estimated and the differential software-synchronized algorithm is much simpler.