Hardware-based monitoring method for all-optical components

In emerging all-optical networks (AONs), efficient monitoring and estimation of signal quality along a lightpath are of highest interest because of their importance in diagnosing and assessing the overall health of the network. This is because transmission in these networks is limited by a number of effects such as optical crosstalk and amplified spontaneous emission. In particular, crosstalk is additive and can be exploited to perform service disruption attacks upon the whole network. Since these attacks can spread rapidly through the network, causing additional awkward failures and triggering multiple undesirable alarms, they must be detected and identified at any point in the network where they may occur. Due to network transparency, this requires particularly the availability of expert diagnostic techniques to measure and control the smallest granular component, the wavelength channel. However, to monitor all wavelengths at several detection points in a node is likely to be a very expensive solution. In this paper we briefly overview optical crosstalk mechanisms that arise in AON components. We then propose a hardware-based method for monitoring performance degradation in AON components that can participate in some tasks for performance management of AONs.