Simultaneous chromatic dispersion, polarization-mode-dispersion and OSNR monitoring at 40Gbit/s.

A novel method for independent and simultaneous monitoring of chromatic dispersion (CD), first-order PMD and OSNR in 40Gbit/s systems is proposed and demonstrated. This is performed using in-band tone monitoring of 5GHz, optically down-converted to a low intermediate-frequency (IF) of 10kHz. The measurement provides a large monitoring range with good accuracies for CD (4742+/-100ps/nm), differential group delay (DGD) (200+/-4ps) and OSNR (23+/-1dB), independently of the bit-rate.