Research Article
Physical layer impairments in WDM core networks: a comparison between a North-American backbone and a Pan-European backbone
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1109/ICBN.2005.1589754, author={Sawsan AL ZAHR and Maurice GAGNAIRE and Nicolas PUECH and Mohamed KOUBAA}, title={Physical layer impairments in WDM core networks: a comparison between a North-American backbone and a Pan-European backbone}, proceedings={2nd International ICST Conference on Broadband Networks}, publisher={IEEE}, proceedings_a={BROADNETS}, year={2006}, month={2}, keywords={}, doi={10.1109/ICBN.2005.1589754} }- Sawsan AL ZAHR
Maurice GAGNAIRE
Nicolas PUECH
Mohamed KOUBAA
Year: 2006
Physical layer impairments in WDM core networks: a comparison between a North-American backbone and a Pan-European backbone
BROADNETS
IEEE
DOI: 10.1109/ICBN.2005.1589754
Abstract
In the absence of all-optical 3R regenerators, the quality of transmission has a strong impact of the feasibility of all-optical long-haul transmission. Four main physical layer impairments degrade the quality of an optical analog signal, namely chromatic dispersion (CD), polarization mode dispersion (PMD), optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR), and nonlinear phase shift (PhiNL). In most previous studies, a Q factor evaluates the quality of transmission in considering the aforementioned parameters individually (Qi with i isin {1,2,3,4}). In this paper, we propose a tool implementing a global Q factor that takes into account the interaction between the four impairments and from which we derive the bit error rate (BER). This new factor referenced as Q8 enables to study the suitability of optical transparency in transport networks. By means of numerical applications, we compare two backbone networks: the North-American NSF network (NSFNET) and the Pan-European backbone (EBN)
