Frequency-Shift Monitoring of Optical Filter Based on Optical Labels over FTN-WDM Transmission Systems

Optical network monitoring and soft failure identification such as optical filter shifting and filter tightening are increasingly significant for the complex and dynamic optical networks of the future. Center frequency shift of optical filtering devices in optical networks has a serious impact on the performance of multi-span transmission, especially in high spectrum efficiency faster-than-Nyquist (FTN) transmission systems with various optical switching and add/drop nodes. Existing monitoring schemes generally have the problems of high cost, high complexity, and inability to realize multi-channel online monitoring, which makes it difficult for them to be applied in a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) system with numerous nodes. In this paper, a monitoring scheme of frequency shift of optical filtering devices based on optical label (OL) is proposed and demonstrated. The signal spectrum of each channel is intentionally divided into many sub-bands with corresponding optical labels loading. The characteristics of spectrum power changing caused by frequency shift can be reflected on labels power changing of each sub-band, which are used to monitor and estimate the value of frequency shift via DSP algorithm. Simulation results show that the monitoring errors of frequency shift can be kept reasonably below 0.5 GHz after 10-span WDM transmission in FTN polarization multiplexing m-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (PM-mQAM) systems. In addition, 250 km fiber transmission experiments are also carried out, and similar results are obtained, which further verify the feasibility of our proposed scheme. The characteristics of low cost, high reliability, and efficiency make it a better candidate for practical application in future FTN-WDM networks.