Separation of noise from distortion for high-speed optical fiber system link budgeting

In optical transmission systems and networks with in-line optical amplifiers, system performance degradations caused by random noise and optical path distortions are usually thought to be inseparable, which makes link performance evaluation complicated. We propose to use an optical system eye-mask parameterization technique to separate noise from distortion in the link budgeting. The basic idea of this approach is to find the worst-case path distortion factor which is independent of the noise characteristics and system implementations. Both theoretical development and experimental verification are discussed.