Simultaneous and Independent OSNR and Chromatic Dispersion Monitoring Using Empirical Moments of Asynchronously Sampled Signal Amplitudes

We analytically investigate and derive equations for the empirical moments of asynchronously sampled signal amplitudes as functions of signal power, noise power, and accumulated chromatic dispersion (CD) of a transmission link. The solutions of these equations enable low-cost, simultaneous and independent monitoring of in-band optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) and CD of the fiber link for various modulation formats and data rates. Numerical simulations are performed to validate the proposed technique and the results demonstrate independent OSNR and CD monitoring with good accuracy and large monitoring ranges. The influence of first-order polarization-mode dispersion (PMD) on the accuracy of the proposed monitoring technique is also investigated.