Optical Channel Monitoring

1. Transparent optical networks will be offered client traffic in optical formats. Because the signals are analog in nature they will degrade along the network until they are no longer recoverable.
2. The challenge is to identify where in a network the quality of the client's traffic has degraded. This will require optical channel monitoring techniques throughout the network.
3. These techniques must be substantially less expensive than detecting a signal and counting errors; otherwise much of the advantage of a transparent network is lost.
4. Use VPItransmissionMaker™ WDM to explore the correlation between numerous optical characteristics and BER, and so identify optical monitoring schemes.