Monitoring optical fiber dispersion for multimedia applications

A technique to monitor chromatic dispersion in optical fiber communication channels is proposed for a 10.7Gbps binary non-return-to-zero (NRZ) intensity modulated signals. The high and low bit distributions of the received signal are collected and analyzed. By analyzing the mean, and variance of these distributions a relationship to model the amount of residual chromatic dispersion was empirically derived. This model estimates the dispersion using the variance of the distribution with an estimation error not exceeding ±3%. This technique results in a constant monitoring sensitivity of 900ps/nm despite the optical fiber transmission distance. This technique can be mainly utilized in the optimization of multimedia traffic flows transmission over optical fiber applications.