Complexity and Accuracy Trade-off for Quality of Transmission Estimation in Wideband Optical Systems

This paper investigates the computational time and accuracy of several alternatives for the estimation of the GSNR of coherently detected signals in multi-band transmission (MBT) systems. The considered optical performance estimation methods are the closed-form ISRS-GN, the FWM, the enhanced FWM, and the numerical GGN (used as a reference). A comprehensive set of results suggests that the closed-form ISRS-GN model has the best trade-off between computation time and accuracy in the evaluated scenarios, enabling fast but still reasonably accurate optical performance estimation for MBT systems with transmission bandwidths up to 20 THz.