Experimental study of cross-phase modulation reduction in hybrid systems with co-propagating 100G PM-QPSK and 10G OOK.

ABSTRACT

We experimentally investigate various methods for reducing cross-phase modulation in hybrid networks with mixed 100G and 10G traffic. The experimental results over standard single-mode and non-zero dispersion-shifted fiber types demonstrate the effectiveness of several different XPM reduction techniques as well as the interplay between them. Nonlinear transmission performance is quantified using the Nonlinear Threshold metric as a function of key system features, including DCM type, dispersion map, spectral guard bands, and carrier phase estimation window size. Fiber Bragg grating-based DCMs are shown to offer a distinct advantage over fiber-based DCMs under certain conditions, particularly in dispersion-managed systems with very strong XPM. The average walk-off per span is introduced as a simple yet effective metric to compare different methods of XPM mitigation.