Impact of physical layer impairments in all-optical networks

We investigate the impact of different physical impairments in the performance of all-optical networks. The physical impairments considered are the gain saturation and amplified spontaneous emission noise depletion in amplifiers, homodyne crosstalk in optical switches, four wave mixing and polarization mode dispersion in the transmission fibers. Our simulation results are presented in terms of blocking probability of requested calls as a function of network device parameters.

I. Introduction

All-optical networks have been considered as the most reliable and economic solution to achieve high transmission capacities. In these networks, the signal remains in the optical domain between the edge nodes, i.e., the signal propagates along the optical network without suffering any optical-electrical-optical conversion.