Modal noise in optical fibre transmission systems

The authors present the results they have obtained on several optical links degraded by modal noise. They are analyzed to show that modal noise can cause a serious problem in optical transmission by producing an important degradation of the bit-error-rate. The authors show that the measurement of the bit-error-rate in optical links is a difficult task because modal noise tends to group errors in packets. Finally, they present an attractive aspect of modal noise for estimating the mechanical vibrations of aerial optical cables