Estimating divergently routed nonlinearly interfering channel powers using cross phase modulation.

The deployment of coherent transceivers in legacy networks requires significant investment in installation. We propose a method enabling autonomous (re-)configuration of an optical channel, which would be advantageous in legacy networks and necessary in proposed future networks utilizing a flexible frequency grid and software defined components such as reconfigurable optical add drop multiplexers (ROADM). We consider potential interfering optical channels propagating with the prospective channel along part of the fiber link which are dropped before arrival at the receiver. The method uses a commercially available line card transmitting a 40Gbit/s polarization multiplexed quadrature phase shift keying (PM-QPSK) probe channel to characterize an optical channel. The power of the nearest neighboring channels is then inferred by examining its bit error rate (BER) which is impacted by cross phase modulation (XPM) from the aggressor channels. In a 4 node network with 2 ROADMs using up to 6 aggressor OOK channels, we successfully deduce the neighboring channel power down to -2 dBm, and an extra improvement down to -3.5 dBm is gained, by measuring at an offset to the international telecommunication union (ITU) grid which also reveals inequality in neighbor channel powers.